E.O. Wilson, an evolutionary biologist (entomologist)
working at Harvard, was recently the focus of a New Yorker article on ants and
altruism. Wilson is an ant man. He’s spent a career studying and writing about
them. He’s one of the most accomplished scientist in his field and made his
name half a century ago when he identified the scent-producing gland in the ant
enabling colony members to find their way to food and back home. Altruism is a
double-edged sword. A group that acts purely altruistically will be destroyed
by its competitors. As an extreme example, a “for profit” enterprise that gives
its profits away won’t compete for long. What about at the individual level
within a group? A group composed of individuals that work at least partially
selflessly will promote the interests of the group before themselves and make the
group stronger. At what expense? Most likely individual gain. A group that is
composed of individuals acting purely selflessly may eventually be carved up by
competitive individuals who join the group. Or, perhaps, the culture of the
group will be sufficient to exclude them; the selfish intruders simply leave.
An ant colony is a great model for thinking about this: within the colony, the
ants work toward a common goal and show extreme amounts of altruism. These
colonies, admittedly, are formidable feats of construction; some are enormous.
At the colony level, however, altruism is not the driving force. These colonies
are expansive, territorial and ferocious; not terribly neighborly. They are certainly
not altruistic. So the dynamics that mediate individual relations within a
group (balance of altruism versus selfishness) are not the same dynamics that
mediate group behavior.
In game theory, the “prisoner’s dilemma” is a great way to
model the individual component of this dynamic. Briefly, two individuals are
detained for a crime and are not allowed to communicate. They are each offered
a deal: if both prisoner A and prisoner B confess, they each get 3 months of
jail time. But if one prisoner confesses while the other remains silent, the “defector”
who confesses will go free while the silent one gets a year in jail. However, If
they both remain silent, they each get one month. What to do? The dilemma for
the prisoner is that the optimal outcome for the individual is to “rat out”
your partner and go free if your partner doesn’t confess. The optimal outcome
for the group (both prisoners) is to keep your mouth shut, expect your partner
to do the same, and serve minimal time. But what happens in reality? When the
game is simulated, prisoner behavior is to maximize individual gain and
confess, yielding a sub-optimal outcome and 3 months of jail time. Within
organizations, an individual will “remain silent” and act altruistically if
there is something to be gained - but only if other individuals are motivated
to behave similarly. The selfless individual within a group who is surrounded
by selfish people will be eaten up (like the prisoner who remains silent while
the other confesses). How does an organization surmount this obstacle? Clearly,
an organization that has a component of altruistic behavior at the individual
level will be more competitive at the group level (don’t believe me? remember the
ant colonies?). Here’s where organizational leadership and “vision” play a
role. You think all “mission statements” are mere window dressing? Wallpaper? I’m
referring to real structural ones – the ones
that hold up the building and define the organization (if you’ve never worked
for an organization like this, trust me, they do exist). The provenance of this
vision is the leadership of the organization. A principal role of an
organization’s leadership is to foster an environment where individuals frame
their work in terms of the organization’s goals, not the individual’s.
