What ties organizations from within?

The history of social organizations that we call companies is just over a century old, if we agree that Frederick Winslow Taylor's 1911 "The Principles of Scientific Management" is the turning point of a paradigm shift in the distribution of workload in firms,? introducing new processes and roles.?

Going back in time to analyze the evolution of relationships in labor contexts, we discover that everything we know about our entire social history (not just about enterprise organizations) is less than 3,000 years old.

From the stories of the Trojan War and told in the Bible we can deduce quite detailed facts about the organization of societies of the time. Archaeological evidence allows us to go back another 2,000 years, but even so we can only reconstruct around 1.5% of social history of humankind.

Paleoanthropological studies enable us to make conjectures about the complexity of the social organizations of Homo Sapiens 40,000 years ago. Thanks to the discovery of the remains of a mammoth hunt in Siberia, and the numerous evidence of rituals and cave paintings, it is possible to imagine the existence of a complex social relationships, specialized skills, and assigned roles even in the Paleolithic age.

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Where is the problem?

The problem is that we know too little about the evolutionary history of our species, whose DNA has not significantly changed in the last 200,000 years.?

For instance, we do not know whether having a male-biased leadership is characteristic of the human species or is the result of cultural stratification; we do not know whether we are collaborative by nature or whether we have “self-domesticated” ourselves to increase cooperation, we do not know in which phase of our evolutionary history we developed language, nor in which part of our body memory il cabled.

If we had these answers, we could exploit numerous advantages in organizational design, for example it would be easier to assign roles, sizing the groups and develop communication codes that reduce misunderstandings.

Furthermore, since it is unclear what we were "born" versus what we have "become", it remains puzzleing in which direction invest more in education and norms to enhance collective well-being.

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How can the study of social animals contribute to managing these issues?

The comparative study of relationships within a company and in animal societies allows us to highlight similarities and differences to understand the unicity of our social intelligence, both at the individual and collective levels.

From this comparison, two interesting aspects emerge that would deserve further investigation. The first refers to similarities and is mentioned below, the second, relating to differences, will be discussed in the next post.?

In terms of similarities, it emerges that the fundamental benefit that bonds group members together is improving defense against predators.

In general, each species has at least a couple of good reasons to live together (increasing mating opportunities, cooperative breeding, cooperative foraging, cold protection, etc.) that offset the costs of increased competition for scarce resources, however, defense from predators seems to be the “common denominator” of social living.

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What insight came out from this observation?

Within the framework of evolutionary psychology, we must wonder the consequences of sharing some behaviors with animals, such as birds, from which we diverged in the evolutionary tree about 200 million years ago.

If a behavior like antipredator defense is so ancient, it could be so hardwired in the deep memory of our human nature to re-emerge at any time.

Therefore, antipredatory behavior could explain certain phenomena of temporary coalition observed in corporate settings, for example, when colleagues, who normally detest each other, cooperate to obstruct another colleague. These coalitions can be explicit, fully intentional, and rational, but often we observe convergent behaviors even when people have not coordinated. In this latter case, the explanation could lie in a bounded-rationality behavior triggered by the perception of a shared fear that drives the search for allies.

In ethology, this behavior is called mobbing, and it is typical of prey species.

Most of our evolutionary history has been lived as prey, scavenging on the leftovers of large predators. This is suggested not only by paleoanthropological studies but also by our species' morphology. We are devoid of the typical arsenal of predators (no claws, no fangs, a slender body suited for walking that easily succumbs in close combat), and this condition has wired in our brain the typical behavioral response of prey.

We are constantly vigilant against potential enemies, resulting in viewing dangers everywhere around us. Our vivid imagination, combined with the tendency to always seek a cause-and-effect relationship, keeps us in a constant state of alert, providing anxiety and many different disorders, as Robert Sapolsky, an eminent neurobiologist and primatologist, explains in his popular book “Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers.”

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·????? R. Sapolsky – Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (1994)

·????? D.L. Hart and R.W. Sussman – Man The Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution (2002)

·????? J.E. Smith et al. - Obstacles and opportunities for female leadership in mammalian societies (2020)