I'm sympathetic to that line of thinking in general, but this specific argument strikes me as suspiciously available. For the selection pressures against low-status independent action in combat to generalize to things like entrepreneurship or research, styles of group combat where those selection pressures dominate would have to have maintained for evolutionarily significant periods of time, and the psychology of group combat would have to be sufficiently close to that of the domains we're discussing for the same instincts to kick in. Perhaps more importantly, they'd have to be common enough not to get lost in the noise of everyday life; "act independently" versus "wait for instructions" is a very general question, and a heritable tendency towards one or the other would have measurable effects on just about every domain.
That's a lot of prerequisites, and I can think of evidence both for and against just about all of them. In the absence of clever and well-designed research into the question, I'd hesitate to draw strong conclusions about its evolutionary roots.
During a discussion today about the bizarre "can't get crap done" phenomenon that afflicts large fractions of our community, the suggestion came up that most people can't do anything where there is a perceived choice that includes the null option / "do nothing" as an option. Of which Michael Vassar made the following observation:
And if you're not the leader, it is not good for your reproductive fitness to act like one. In modern times the penalties for standing up are much lower, but our instincts haven't updated.
Interesting to reconsider the events of "To lead, you must stand up" in this light. It makes more sense if you read it as "None of those people had instincts saying it was a good idea to declare themselves the leader of the monkey tribe, in order to solve this particular coordination problem where 'do nothing' felt like a viable option" instead of "nobody had the initiative".