According to the theory, "what an individual actually does when acting as a leader is in large part dependent upon characteristics of the situation in which he functions." In this example, praise (the stimulus) is a positive reinforcer for this employee because the employee arrives at work on time (the behavior) more frequently after being praised for showing up to work on time. Positive reinforcement occurs when a positive stimulus is presented in response to a behavior, which increases the likelihood of that behavior in the future. B. F. Skinner is the father of behavior modification and developed the concept of positive reinforcement.
Functional leadership theory addresses specific leader behaviors that contribute to organizational or unit effectiveness. In contrast to the Fiedler contingency model, the path-goal model states that the four leadership behaviors are fluid, and that leaders can adopt any of the four depending on what the situation demands. The Michigan State Studies, which were conducted in the 1950s, made further investigations and findings that positively correlated behaviors and leadership effectiveness. They identified particular behaviors that were reflective of leadership effectiveness. In 1945, Ohio State University conducted a study which investigated observable behaviors portrayed by effective leaders.
Whereas testosterone is the primary reproductive hormone in males, estradiol (an estrogen) is the predominant estrogen found in pre-menopausal females and may have greater consequences for status seeking in females. Some evidence suggests that the association between the testosterone × cortisol interaction and behavior is stronger in males than females (Dekkers et al., 2019). We recommend that future studies test for testosterone × cortisol associations on behavioral or implicit measures of status-seeking motives (e.g. the picture story exercise; Stanton & Schultheiss, 2007), or on direct measures of status attainment. To provide more certainty as to whether a specific dual-hormone finding is reproducible, we recommend that researchers conduct high-powered pre-registered replication studies that examine associations between dual-hormone interactions and the same behavioral outcome measure used in a previous study. We recommend that researchers adopt pre-registration or registered reports in new studies that are being planned to test the dual hormone hypothesis. As such, there are new opportunities for discovery on associations between these dual-hormone interactions, status-seeking behaviors and actual status attainment, as well as better understanding the causal pathways that explain these associations. The results did not provide strong evidence for a testosterone × cortisol interaction in line with the dual-hormone hypothesis.
We have recently defined the first animal to arrive as the leader, as this individual influences the movement of others, and therefore we classify hyrax leadership as a behavior that involves risk17. The dual-hormone hypothesis (DHH) was developed to explain the inconsistences in research on testosterone and human social behavior5,6. Evolutionary theories imply that risk-taking may have evolved as a behavioral strategy for social status achievement, and that individuals who have much to lose should be more risk-averse than individuals who have little to lose3. We used proximity loggers, observations, and playback trials to characterize hyrax leaders in three different leadership contexts that varied in their risk levels.
This pattern suggests that future dual-hormone research should target the most direct measures of status possible – e.g., status conferred in naturally occurring groups (Edwards & Casto, 2013; Casto et al., 2019). Given the limitations of immunoassays for testosterone measurement that we described earlier, we recommend that these replication studies adopt mass-spectrometry based methods for testosterone measurement. Studies included in the Dekkers et al. (2019) meta-analysis used a variety of methods to test the dual-hormone hypothesis across a range of outcomes. When a dual-hormone interaction is found through exploratory analyses, we recommend that researchers be explicit that the analyses that produced the result were exploratory in nature. Although some of the recommendations we provide are not specific to research on the dual-hormone hypothesis and could improve methods in any research domain, future research on the dual-hormone hypothesis would benefit from careful attention to these issues. Stress plays a fundamental role in animal competition and mating, which are relevant to social status (Sapolsky, 2005). The authors proposed a multifaceted role for testosterone, where baseline testosterone levels are involved in the development and maintenance of reproductive systems.
Additionally, they have a higher likelihood of being chosen as leaders within these groups. However, groups generally prefer leaders that do not exceed in intelligence the prowess of average member by a wide margin, as they fear that high intelligence may be translated to differences in communication, trust, interests, and values. Individuals with higher intelligence exhibit superior judgement, higher verbal skills (both written and oral), quicker learning and acquisition of knowledge, and are more likely to emerge as leaders. Such people communicate their ideas in more robust ways, are better able to read the politics of a situation, are less likely to lose control of their emotions, are less likely to be inappropriately angry or critical, and in consequence are more likely to emerge as leaders. Individuals with dominant personalities (they describe themselves as high in the desire to control their environment and influence other people, and are likely to express their opinions in a forceful way) are more likely to act as leaders in small-group situations. Individuals who are more aware of their personality qualities, including their values and beliefs, and are less biased when processing self-relevant information, are more likely to be accepted as leaders. Leadership emergence is the idea that people born with specific characteristics become leaders, and those without these characteristics do not become leaders.
Ultimately, a fuller understanding of the endocrine bases of status seeking will require the integration of the effects of other relevant hormones and consider meaningful social-contextual and individual differences that would interact with the endocrine system in the regulation of social behavior. These studies are based on the assumption of a direct, causal association between social contexts and hormone levels, consistent with the challenge hypothesis. But when acute cortisol changes are expected prior to the measurement of status-seeking behavior, acute cortisol responses to the stressor may be a stronger moderator of testosterone’s behavioral effects compared to basal cortisol. We tentatively propose that in situations in which there is little to no expectation that participants experience cortisol changes prior to measuring status-seeking behavior (e.g. no acute stressor), basal cortisol will moderate testosterone’s association with status-seeking behavior. A similar pattern was reported in another study, in which a stress condition blocked an association between higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of a behavioral index of empathic accuracy that was seen in a control (non-stress) condition (a link between testosterone levels and self-reported empathy was not found; Nitschke & Bartz, in press).