Biology Affects Business

Businesspeople are animals.

I say this literally, not figuratively. Like all human beings, people who work in the business world are members of the animal kingdom.

I make this incredibly self-evident point to motivate a discussion of scholarly research on how aspects of human biology affect business activity. As with all animal behaviour, biology matters, in the workplace and elsewhere.

Last fall, I edited a special issue of a scholarly journal that examined the “biological basis of business.” The project examined biological explanations for different aspects of business, including leadership, entrepreneurship, purchasing, and the management of groups.

Because the papers are scholarly articles, they aren’t the easiest things to read. So I’m briefly summarising what they say so that business practitioners can see what the academic researchers have found.

Two of the seven papers examine the effects of the hormone testosterone. In one paper, Michael Zyphur and Jayanth Narayanan show that groups function more effectively when individuals high in testosterone are in more dominant positions. While not very politically correct, this finding raises interesting questions about the roles people play in organisations.

In another paper Gad Saad and John Vongas found that men’s testosterone levels rose in response to driving an expensive sports car but that driving a family sedan didn’t significantly change the participants’ testosterone levels. Maybe there is something very basic in our biology that drives how companies market cars to us.

Three of the papers looked at genetics. Zhen Zhang, Michael Zyphur, Jayanth Narayanan, Richard Arvey, Sankalp Chaturved, Bruce Avolio, Paul Lichtenstein, and Gerry Larsson, found genes affect the decision of women to become entrepreneurs, but doesn’t affect the same decision by men. And for women, the same genetic factors that influence the development of two personality traits – extraversion and neuroticism – also affect the propensity to be an entrepreneur. This article suggests that some part of what motivates women to be entrepreneurs is inborn.

In a paper, with my colleagues Nicos Nicolaou, Lynn Cherkas, and Tim Spector, I showed that the same genetic factors affect both the tendency to identify new business opportunities and the tendency to be an entrepreneur. Maybe some of the innate part of what motivates people to be entrepreneurs is the ability to recognize new business opportunities that others miss.

A study by Zhen Zhang, Remus Ilies, and Richard D Arvey showed that genetic factors influence the odds of achieving leadership positions, but more so if people were raised in less enriching family environments. This article suggests that creating leaders doesn’t just mean getting the training right, it means focusing on people innately predisposed to respond to that training.

Two of the papers looked at brain activity. Work by James Dulebohn, Donald Conlon, Issidoros Sarinopoulos, Robert B Davison, and Gerry McNamara looked at how the brain responds to unfairness. They found that find that unfair procedures stimulate the parts of the brain that govern social cognition, whereas unfair outcomes stimulate the parts of the brain that govern emotion. The article suggests that the emotional centers of our brains respond when we think that bonus allocations, raises, or other workplace outcomes are unfair.

A study by Malia Mason, Rebecca Dyer and Michael Norton looked at how the brain processes social influences. They found that the medial prefrontal cortex was the part of the brain that identified whether objects were endorsed by others, whereas the caudate was the part where popular and unpopular objects were differentiated. The article suggests that we use different parts of our brain to think about different kinds of messages, such as those contained in advertising.

These are all scholarly papers designed to look at small parts of a bigger picture of biological influences on business. While the work hasn’t been extensively replicated and it’s not clear that you can do anything practical with the results at this point in time, many of the papers are both interesting and provocative.

They also show that business scholars are doing what E.O. Wilson predicted in his 1998 book Conscilience using hard science findings, particularly about genetics and neurology, to inform social science research.

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