Shared Leadership: What Can Be Learned From Fish and Ants

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Short Description

Are there follower fish, transformational ants, or situational wolves? It turns out that many animals enact shared leadership. Recent research on fish and ants will be shared to spark a unique debate: How are leadership and followership in humans both different and the same as in other animals? What can we learn from this?

Detailed Abstract

Leadership narratives tend to be individual-centric, i.e., exceptional team outcomes – whether negative or positive – are due to the actions of one person (Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985; O’Toole, Galbraith, & Lawler III, 2003; Zaccaro, Rittman, & Marks, 2001). Theories such as transformational, charismatic, servant, or authentic leadership largely incorporate this perspective into their research paradigms although some disagree that it produces a necessary or desirable description of leadership (Bennis, 2008; Burns, 1978; Kelley, 1992).

A number of animals have been found to exhibit shared leadership including monkeys (Kummer, 1968; Leca, Gunst, Thierry, & Petit, 2003; Lee & Teichroeb, 2016; Stueckle & Zinner, 2008), horses (Bourjade, Thierry, Hausberger, & Petit, 2015; Krueger, Flauger, Farmer, & Hemelrijk, 2014), ungulates (Fischhoff et al., 2007; Ramos, Petit, Longour, Pasquaretta, & Sueur, 2015), and eusocial insects (Collignon & Detrain, 2010; Visscher, 2007).

In this session, we present shared leadership in two species: fish (specifically guppies and sticklebacks) and ants. The results illustrate novel possibilities for how humans can or should enact shared leadership.

Ants
According to Darwin (1871), if a group includes individuals that are able and willing to prepare others for impeding threats, to aid and protect, this group would be sustainable. Ant colonies cluster together and optimize using this principle.

When multiple food sources are present, ants must quickly harvest known found sources, search for new ones, and dynamically optimize where to allocate resources (Gao, Wang, Cheng, Inazumi & Tang, 2016). If ants fail to change paths when a more optimal option is available, the survival of the colony would be threatened.

The colony resolves such dynamic optimization problems using special chemical pheromones to communicate and exchange knowledge with each other and the environment, creating collaborative systems of leadership and followership that benefit the entire colony. Though the complexities of humans far exceed those of ants, there are critical lessons that can be distilled and applied to improving adaptability in human teams.

Fish
Prey fish congregate into schools for many reasons including: greater foraging success due to information sharing about food location within the group, an enhanced ability to detect prey, escape from predators due to the confusing presence of a large number of potential targets (Landeau & Terborgh, 1986), a reduction in the chance to be targeted by a predator (the dilution effect) especially if there are less healthy or fit alternatives in the school, and a reduction in the need for individual fish to monitor the environment for predators. Schooling, however, requires coordination in movement and in role specialization to create the needed efficiencies (Beauchamp, 2014).

Two species of fish, guppies (Poecillia reticulate) and the three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) exhibit leader-follower relationships within a shared leadership framework, to enable group coordination. A series of experiments (Dyer, Croft, Morrell, & Krause, 2008; Harcourt, Ang, Seetman, Johnstone, & Manica, 2009; Nakayama, Harcourt, Johnstone, & Manica, 2012; Nakayama, Stumpe, Manica, & Johnstone, 2013; Sumpter, Krause, James, Couzin, & Ward, 2008) paint a picture of an intricate, complex dance where leadership and followership roles are interchanged, training on both roles has surprising outcomes, and behaviors mimic those we commonly see in humans. It opens up new possibilities to how we apprehend leadership and, in particular, suggests that shared leadership is more common in animals (and perhaps, humans) than is generally appreciated.

Participants

• Marc Hurwitz, University of Waterloo

• Stephanie Colbry, Northeastern University