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The Conference Board Review® Article
Pecking Orders
Why some lead and others follow.
By Barbara Kellerman
Barbara Kellerman is James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and author of a number of books on leadership. Adapted from Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders (Harvard Business Press). ©2008
How do leaders and followers relate? No less an expert on the subject than Hermann Goering had rather a simple view: Leaders lead and followers follow. During his trial at Nuremberg, he told an interviewer, "It's the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it's a democracy or a fascist dictatorship. . . . The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leader." Goering had a point. Most followers follow most leaders.
The rewards of leading are obvious. Power and influence, status, and access to resources including money and sex are among the benefits of being a leader. But what are the attractions of following? What's in it for us? Why do most of us go along most of the time, even with leaders of whom we do not approve?
Sometimes the benefits are readily apparent. Sometimes we follow leaders because we admire who they are and what they do. But there are other times when neither applies — and still we go along. Why? Why do we follow leaders with whom we find fault? The answer is self-interest. We calculate that the benefits of following outweigh those of not following, and we calculate that the cost of resisting is higher than the cost of going along. For example, in the workplace we (usually) comply because not to comply puts at risk the money we need and want to spend. And in the community we (usually) comply because it satisfies our need for stability and security. In any case, not to comply is often judged more trouble than it's worth. In fact, this calculus holds even when the circumstances are extreme, when we obey orders for fear that if we do not, we could be harmed or even killed.
To understand why followers generally go along voluntarily with their leaders, it's best to begin at the beginning, with one of the world's great experts on primate behavior. In his book Our Inner Ape, Frans de Waal explores deference in groups and finds the phenomenon ubiquitous. He begins by making the case for connection: "One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. This also applies to us, bipedal apes." The connection between humans and other primates applies particularly in two realms: power and sex. Sex is not the primary concern here, but power obviously is. So de Waal's statements about hierarchies in general, and about the functions of followers in particular, are right on point.
Leaders are clearly advantaged — to wit, the power and money to which I earlier referred. In fact, leaders are advantaged everywhere in the animal kingdom. From frogs and rats to chickens and elephants, high rank translates into food for females and mates for males. No surprise, then, that we are generally ambitious to achieve high rank — and equally no surprise that some among us will be more adept at doing so than others. But de Waal's main point is not about leaders per se but, rather, about the hierarchies over which they preside. The hierarchy constitutes a whole, in which the few are superiors and the many are subordinates. As he puts it, it's hard to "name a single discovery in animal behavior that enjoys wider name recognition than the 'pecking order.'"
Comments? Write a letter to the editor.
Return to the March/April 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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