The Adaptationist Theory of Cooperation in Groups: Evolutionary Predictions for Organizational Cooperation

Managers could more effectively promote cooperation within their organizations if they had greater understanding of how evolution designed people to cooperate. Here we present a theory of group cooperation – the Adaptationist Theory of Cooperation in Groups (ATCG) – that is primarily an effort to pull together the scattered findings of a large number of evolution-minded researchers, and to integrate these findings into a single coherent theory. We present ATCG in three main sections: first, we discuss the basic premise that group cooperation evolved because it allowed individuals to acquire personal fitness benefits from acting in synergy with others; second, we examine the cooperative strategy that most often prevails in successful groups, “reciprocal altruism”, and the free rider problem that constantly threatens it; and third, we explore how cooperative behavior is affected by differences (a) among individuals, (b) between the sexes, and (c) among different kinds of resources that a group may share. Throughout all of these sections, we suggest ways in which ATCG’s predictions could be usefully applied in real organizations. We conclude that while ATCG is consistent in some regards with existing theories from organizational behaviour, its individual-level adaptationist perspective allows it to make a variety of novel predictions.