An Agent-Based Model of Leader Emergence and Leadership Perception within a Collective

Shun Cao, Neil G. MacLaren, Yiding Cao, Yingjun Dong, Hiroki Sayama, Francis J. Yammarino, Shelley D. Dionne, Michael D. Mumford, Shane Connelly, Robert Martin, Colleen J. Standish, Tanner R. Newbold, Samantha England and Gregory A. Ruark

Complexity, 2020, vol. 2020, 1-11

Abstract:

Effective teamwork in an initially leaderless group requires a high level of collective leadership emerging from dynamic interactions among group members. Leader emergence is a crucial topic in collective leadership, yet it is challenging to investigate as the problem context is typically highly complex and dynamic. Here, we explore leadership emergence and leadership perception by means of computational simulations whose assumptions and parameters were informed by empirical research and human-subject experiments. Our agent-based model describes the process of group planning. Each agent is assigned with three key attributes: talkativeness , intelligence , and credibility . An agent can propose a suggestion to modify the group plan as a speaker or respond and evaluate others’ suggestions and leadership as a listener. Simulation results suggested that agents with high values of talkativeness , intelligence , and credibility tended to be perceived as leaders by their peers. Results also showed that talkativeness may be the most significant and instantaneous predictor for leader emergence of the three investigated attributes: talkativeness, intelligence, and credibility. In terms of group performance, smaller groups may outperform larger groups regarding their problem-solving ability in the beginning, but their performance tends to be of no significant difference in a long run. These results match the empirical literature and offer a mechanistic, operationalized description of the collective leadership processes.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/8503/2020/6857891.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/8503/2020/6857891.xml (text/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hin:complx:6857891

DOI: 10.1155/2020/6857891

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Complexity from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem (mohamed.abdelhakeem@hindawi.com).