Throughout their evolutionary history, humans recurringly faced situations in which following an effective leader was important for survival. As a result, people today still have an evolved flexible followership psychology that enables them to select different leaders in different situations. For example, people follow very different leaders in war or in peace, when they are part of a tight-knit community or when they live more isolated lives, and when rules for sharing and getting ahead are clear and openly discussed or when they are opaque, discussed behind closed doors, and possibly murky. People in these different contexts are likely to need very different things from their leaders and as a result turn to very different people to meet those needs.

A previously established framework identified and described three fundamental follower needs: the needs for protection, guidance, and fairness. Building on this original set, this project first created a more complete model of follower needs. A literature search revealed two additional fundamental needs that leaders can meet: status and affiliation. Moreover, guidance turned out to consist of two separable needs: vision and expertise, resulting in a comprehensive set of six fundamental follower needs.

Having identified these six needs, we then developed and carefully validated a scale, the Fundamental Follower Needs Inventory (FFNI), to measure them. We found that the same six follower needs emerged for men and women, for business leaders and political leaders, and across people in the Uk and US and in China. At the same time, we fund some differences in their relatively importance: women had a stronger follower need for affiliation than men and people on average had a stronger need for protection from political leaders than from business leaders. Overall, we found that the FFNI is a powerful tool to measure follower needs in different situations and a strong predictor of people’s leadership ideals.