Leadership, Followership, and Evolution: Some Lessons from the Past
Van Vugt and colleagues apply evolutionary psychology to leadership — the argument that the cognitive architecture humans use to lead and follow each other was shaped by small-group hunter-gatherer life, and most contemporary leadership contexts are mismatches with that architecture.
The piece is serious academic work, not pop evolutionary psychology, and the reasoning is careful.
For product direction the transfer is useful as perspective: many of the frictions in modern organisations (large groups, hierarchical relationships, followership at a distance) are evolutionarily novel, and noticing that does not solve them but does reframe what "natural" means.
Read alongside Alznauer's Leading Naturally for the applied version.
Central argument
Van Vugt, Hogan, and Kaiser argue that the psychological mechanisms humans use to lead and follow were forged in small-scale, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, where leadership was contextual, earned through demonstrated competence, and easily revoked by followers. Modern organisational contexts — large hierarchies, anonymous authority, remote or delegated leadership — are evolutionary mismatches for this inherited architecture, not its natural expression. The implication is that many persistent organisational dysfunctions (resistance to authority, coalition-forming, leader derailment) are not failures of culture or individual character but predictable outputs of cognitive systems operating outside their design envelope.
Critique
The evolutionary framing risks being unfalsifiable in practice: once you accept that modern organisations are mismatches with ancestral psychology, almost any observed dysfunction can be retroactively explained as an expression of that mismatch, making the theory descriptively rich but predictively weak. The paper also underspecifies the mechanisms by which evolutionary pressures translate into concrete cognitive biases relevant to, say, a specific hierarchical structure — the explanatory gap between Pleistocene band dynamics and a 500-person product organisation is wide enough that the framework can illuminate without actually guiding action. A thoughtful reader might also note that the evidence base leans heavily on cross-cultural studies of small societies and animal behaviour, which requires non-trivial inferential steps to reach conclusions about contemporary professional contexts.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, the most actionable implication is about span and scale: the evolved followership instinct is calibrated for small groups where the leader is visible, competent, and reciprocally accountable — which is a reasonable description of a well-functioning product squad but almost nothing else in a scaled product organisation. This reframes why product leadership becomes structurally harder as organisations grow: the degradation is not primarily a skills problem but an architectural one, where the human hardware for followership simply loses resolution at scale. It also offers a precise reason why product discovery works better in small, stable, cross-functional teams than in large programme structures — you are not just managing cognitive load, you are staying closer to the group size for which people's cooperative instincts were actually built.