Illuminating the nature of leadership and followership requires insights into not only how leaders and followers behave, but also the different cognitions that underpin these social relationships. We argue that the roots of leader and follower roles and status asymmetries often lie in basic mental processes such as attention and visual perception. To understand not only how but also why leaders’ and followers’ behavioral patterns vary, we focus here on underpinning attentional processes that often drive rank-based behaviors. Methodologically, this focus on basic attentional and perceptual processes lessens the reliance on self-report and questionnaire-based data, and expands our scientific understanding to actual, real-world leadership dynamics. Here, we review the available evidence indicating that leaders and followers differ in whether and how they receive, direct, and pay visual attention. Our review brings together diverse empirical evidence from organization science, primatology, and social, developmental, and cognitive psychology on eye gaze, attention, and status in adults, children, and non-human primates. Based on this review of the cross-disciplinary literature, we propose future directions and research questions that this attention-based approach can generate for illuminating the puzzle of leadership and followership.

阐明领导力和追随者的本质不仅需要深入了解领导者和追随者的行为方式，还需要了解支撑这些社会关系的不同认知。我们认为，领导者和追随者角色以及地位不对称的根源往往在于基本的心理过程，例如注意力和视觉感知。为了不仅了解领导者和追随者的行为模式如何不同，而且为何不同，我们在此重点关注通常驱动基于等级的行为的注意力过程的基础。从方法上讲，这种对基本注意力和感知过程的关注减少了对自我报告和基于问卷调查的数据的依赖，并将我们的科学理解扩展到实际的、现实世界的领导力动态。在这里，我们回顾了现有的证据，表明领导者和追随者在是否以及如何接受、引导和关注视觉注意力方面存在差异。我们的综述汇集了来自组织科学、灵长类动物学以及社会、发展和认知心理学的关于成人、儿童和非人类灵长类动物的目光、注意力和状态的各种经验证据。基于对跨学科文献的回顾，我们提出了这种基于注意力的方法可以产生的未来方向和研究问题，以阐明领导力和追随力的难题。