All organisations have problems, and nearly all of them concern people. These include how to manage employees and motivate them; who to promote, and who to fire. To address these issues, billions have been spent on interventions to attract and retain the right people. Yet despite these efforts, the majority of employees remain disenchanted with their careers. …
Continue reading Overview: The Talent Delusion, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
From an evolutionary perspective, the existence of personality differences presents a puzzle. Natural selection tends to weed out variation that deviates from optimal adaptations. Therefore, how are personality differences maintained in local environments? In September's edition of Evolution & Human Behavior, psychologist Reinout E. de Vries and his colleagues present a general framework which addresses this puzzle. In the process, …
Continue reading The HEXACO Model of Personality from an Evolutionary Perspective
Dean Karnazes started his professional running career relatively late in life. As a teenager, Dean had been a top runner at his school’s cross-country team. However, the joys and demands of modern life later took hold. Karnazes went to university, got married, and pursued a business career—quickly rising ranks in his sales job. But something …
Continue reading A Virtuous Sin: An Overview of ‘Take Pride’ by Jessica Tracy
One of the defining features of human psychology is our extraordinary prosociality. How can cooperation and prosocial behaviour be maintained, despite the immediate temptations to free-ride and deflect? In a paper published in the September edition of the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, organisational psychologists Allen Grabo and Mark van Vugt explore the origins and functions of charismatic leadership. Charismatic …
Continue reading Charismatic Leadership Through the Lens of Evolution
An evolutionary perspective provides a powerful way of thinking about employees' health. What I've outlined below is Zhen Zhang and Michael Zyphur's chapter on employee health and physiological functioning, in Stephen Colarelli and Richard Arvey's volume The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior. The chapter provides a wealth of information regarding employee health and physiology, and I'll focus mainly …
Continue reading Employee Health from an Evolutionary Perspective
How can evolutionary theory be applied to and influence the ways in which we research and practice human resource management (HRM)? In No Best Way, Professor Stephen Colarelli notes that the theory of evolution has been the theoretical bedrock of the life sciences for well over a century, yet it is has only just begun making inroads …
Continue reading No Best Way: An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Resource Management
What follows is an overview of Michael Price (Brunel University, London) and Dominic Johnson's (Edinburgh University) 'Adaptionist Theory of Cooperation in Groups', as outlined in Gad Saad's (2011) Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. -- To help explain organizational cooperation from an evolutionary perspective, Price and Johnson developed the 'Adaptionist Theory of Cooperation in Groups'- abbreviated …
Continue reading ATCG: Evolutionary Predictions for Organizational Cooperation
Whilst on holiday I decided to read a book telling the life story of one of the world's most influential evolutionary theorists. Despite it not being about the application of evolutionary psychology to the workplace, I thought this post would be of value regardless. The scientist in question is Robert Trivers. Robert Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist, who has …
Continue reading A Wild Life: An overview of Robert Trivers’ autobiography
Malcom Gladwell polled Fortune's top 500 companies for his 2005 book Blink, and found the average height of male CEOs was just under 6 ft, but the average American male is 5 ft 9 inches. Around 58% of these CEOs were 6 ft or taller, whereas 14.5% of men in the US population are this tall. Approximately 30% of …
Continue reading Naturally Selected: The Evolutionary Science of Leadership
How did we evolve from small-scale societies of foragers and hunter-gathers into large-scale industrial societies, in an evolutionary blip of 10,000 years? In Ultrasociety, historian Peter Turchin advances a scientific approach to history to identify the causal mechanisms that enabled large-scale society- a strand of research Turchin calls Cliodynamics. Through quantitative analysis and modelling, Turchin …
Continue reading Cooperate To Compete: An Overview of ‘Ultrasociety’, by Peter Turchin
Darwinian Business 