Testing multi-disciplinary theories of leadership using a cross-cultural database

所有的社会都有领袖。在许多社会中，例如美国，存在与空间行政等级相对应的领导职位等级制度，例如市、县、州和联邦政府。在其他社会中，这种等级制度并不存在，领导人的权利和义务也没有正式界定。这种全球变异性产生了同样多样的学术理论；尽管如此，人们对领导力仍然知之甚少。例如，为什么有些领导者用身体上的威胁和侵略来让他们的追随者产生恐惧，而另一些领导者用他们的技能和知识来吸引追随者？一些理论强调我们的灵长类遗传：在灵长类群体中，身体较强壮的个体可以支配身体较弱的个体。这可能有助于解释为什么一些人类领导者会用身体威胁他们的追随者。其他理论指出了领导者在促进人类合作方面的重要性：领导者可能需要通过组织劳动分工和惩罚搭便车者来维持大群体的合作。另外，在战争和其他形式的群体冲突中，领导者可能很重要。还有一些理论强调有价值的知识从一代传到下一代，这也许可以解释为什么领导者通常拥有卓越的技能和能力。这些理论对选择和培训广泛角色中的领导者具有重要意义，例如在学校；地方、州和联邦政府机构；企业;以及其他许多组织。不幸的是，这些理论都没有在所有的社会类型中得到系统的检验。因此，为了解决这一差距，华盛顿州立大学人类学家爱德华·h·哈根博士将使用人类关系领域档案（HRAF）来测试领导力理论，HRAF是一个包含数百万页数字化书籍、文章和其他文件的数据库，描述了数百个不同的社会。HRAF数据库囊括了人类社会已知的许多文化多样性，可用于对几种有影响力的领导力理论进行广泛的跨文化测试。研究者将从运用人类学、心理学、社会学和生物学的关键领导理论开始，以产生一组变量，这些变量将用于编码HRAF中每个关于领导的民族志描述。这些加密账户将被用来检验这些理论。其次，讨论领导者的素质和职能，以及领导者和追随者领导的成本和收益的文本将被隔离和编码，以提供关于这些主题的第一个系统的跨文化数据。第三，HRAF材料将受到元民族志和文本挖掘技术的影响，如潜在语义分析，目的是识别报告案例和领导文化模型之间的共同点和差异。本研究将为演化型领导理论这一新兴分支学科提供全面的跨文化基础，并为未来演化型和文化型领导模型提供实证基础。该项目编制的数据库将提供给其他学者和一般公众。所使用的方法将成为今后使用HRAF进行调查的一个模式。资助这项研究也为两名美国研究生提供了一个受指导的研究机会。

All societies have leaders. In many societies, such as the United States, there is a hierarchy of leadership positions corresponding to spatial administrative hierarchies, such as of cities, counties, states, and the Federal government. In other societies, such hierarchies do not exist and the rights and duties of leaders are not formally delineated. This global variability has produced an equal variety of scholarly theories; nonetheless, leadership remains poorly understood. For example, why do some leaders use physical threats and aggression to instill fear in their followers, but other leaders attract followers with their skills and knowledge? Some theories emphasize our primate heritage: in groups of primates, physically stronger individuals can dominate physically weaker individuals. This might help explain why some human leaders physically threaten their followers. Other theories point to the importance of leaders in promoting human cooperation: leaders might be needed to maintain cooperation in large groups by organizing the division of labor and punishing free-riders. Alternatively, leaders might be important during warfare and other forms of conflict between groups. Still other theories emphasize the transmission of valuable knowledge from one generation to the next, which might explain why leaders often have superior skills and abilities. These theories have important implications for selecting and training leaders in a broad number of roles, such as in schools; local, state, and federal government agencies; businesses; and numerous other organizations. Unfortunately, none of these theories has been tested systematically across the full range of social types. Therefore, to address this gap, Washington State University anthropologist, Dr. Edward H. Hagen, will test theories of leadership using the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), a database of millions of digitized pages of books, articles and other documents that describe hundreds of different societies. The HRAF database captures much of the known cultural diversity of human society and can be used for a wide, cross-cultural test of several influential theories of leadership.The investigator will begin by operationalizing key theories of leadership from anthropology, psychology, sociology, and biology to produce set of variables that will be used to code each ethnographic account of leadership in the HRAF. The coded accounts will then be used to test these theories. Second, the texts discussing the qualities and functions of leaders, and the costs and benefits of leadership for both leaders and followers, will be isolated and coded for analyses providing the first systematic cross-cultural data on these subjects. Third, the HRAF material will be subject to meta-ethnographic and text-mining techniques, such as latent semantic analysis, with the goal of identifying commonalities and differences among the reported cases and cultural models of leadership. The research will give the emerging subdiscipline of evolutionary leadership theory a comprehensive cross-cultural foundation and provide an empirical basis for future evolutionary and cultural models of leadership. The database produced by the project will be made available to other scholars and to the general public. The methodology used will be a model for future investigations using the HRAF. Funding this research also provides a mentored research opportunity for two American graduate students.