Search results

The purpose of this paper is to integrate academic research on hubristic organizational leaders by proposing a comprehensive conceptual framework and research directions on the hubristic literature.

The paper systematically reviewed 25 years of literature on hubristic organizational leaders based on the PRISMA methodology.

The literature on hubristic leaders is analyzed, and a conceptual framework is presented that highlights the antecedent, consequence, mediators and moderators. Literature has primarily focused on the negative impact of hubris leadership concerning firm performance and destructive behaviors. Few scholars have explored the positive side of hubris leadership, relating it to innovation and product success.

This paper presents the first systematic review of hubristic organizational leaders, to the best of the authors’ knowledge. The review provides an improved grasp of the current status of research, trends and potential future research directions.

There is growing interest in how hubris bias shapes managerial and entrepreneurial judgments and decisions and, in turn, firm strategy and performance. Based on a 44-years dataset of articles reaching the beginning of 2023, the authors offer a synthesis of hubris research published within business journals.

The authors implement a mixed-method approach offering a content representation of 600 peer-reviewed articles extracted from Scopus. The authors conduct a bibliometric investigation – employing Excel, VOSViewer and Biblioshiny software – and perform a qualitative review.

The analysis unveils four thematic clusters: hubris bias in financial policies (Cluster 1), hubris bias in restructuring deals (Cluster 2), hubris bias in entrepreneurial contexts (Cluster 3) and hubris bias in strategic decision-making (Cluster 4). Moreover, the authors infer that hubris research in business predominantly developed from three disciplinary perspectives – finance, entrepreneurship and strategic management – and progressed with limited interdisciplinary dialogue.

The authors call practitioners' attention to the impact of the hubris bias in forming financial, entrepreneurial and strategic choices. Managers get conscious of the risks of hubristic choices; hence, they implement organizational practices that move forward with unbiased (or less biased) judgments and decisions.

The authors offer an up-to-date and comprehensive view of hubris research in business. Furthermore, the authors provide an integrative framework and a research agenda.

Can personality traits of chief executive officers (CEOs) be detected at a distance? Following newspaper speculation that the banking crisis of 2008 was partly caused by CEO hubris, this paper seeks to analyse the CEO letters to shareholders of a single bank over ten years for evidence of CEO personality traits, including narcissism (a contributor to hubris), hubris, overconfidence and CEO‐attribution. Following predictions that hubris increases the longer individuals occupy positions of power, the research aims to examine whether hubristic characteristics intensify over time.

This paper takes concepts of hubris from the clinical psychology literature and applies them to discourses in CEO letters to shareholders in annual reports. The research comprises a longitudinal study of the discretionary narrative disclosures in the CEO letters to shareholders in eight annual reports, benchmarked against disclosures in the CEO letters to shareholders of the previous and subsequent CEOs of the same organisation.

The results point to evidence of narcissism and hubris in the personality of the bank CEO. Over half the sentences analysed were found to contain narcissistic‐speak. In 45 per cent of narcissistic‐speak sentences, there were three of more symptoms of hubris – what Owen and Davison describe as extreme hubristic behaviour. In relation to CEO overconfidence, only seven sentences (2 per cent) contained bad news. More than half of the good news was attributed to the CEO and all the bad news was attributed externally. The research thus finds evidence of hubris in the CEO letters to shareholders, which became more pronounced the longer the CEO served.

The analysis of CEO discourse is highly subjective, and difficult to replicate.

The primary contribution of this research is the adaptation of the 14 clinical symptoms of hubris from clinical psychology to the analysis of narratives in CEO letters to shareholders in annual reports to reveal signs of CEO hubris.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the tension between a firm’s CEO power features and externally observable hubris attributes may determine the likelihood of financial misreporting.

The analyses are based on a sample of 16 Canadian firms for which there were formal accusations of financial reporting fraud filed by securities regulators, assorted with regulatory sanctions; as well as 16 firms matched on industry and size with no evidence of financial misreporting.

The findings suggest that firms accused of financial misreporting exhibit features of strong CEO power and hubris as reflected in their relations with the self, others and the world. Governance mechanisms do not seem to be effective in detecting or preventing financial misreporting, with independent boards of directors proving especially ineffectual.

The findings suggest that formal governance processes may get coopted by a CEO with hubristic tendencies.

While the tentative model is more explanatory than predictive, it opens up a new research area as it brings the concept of hubris into accounting research.

This paper aims to explore the association between chairperson hubris and the internationalization of firms belonging to business groups in an emerging market, India, under the boundary conditions of business group internationalization and the tenure of independent board members.

Archival data of 163 Indian family firms over a five-year period were used.

The study highlights the significance of chairperson hubris in determining the internationalization of family firms in India and the influence that business group internationalization and the tenure of independent board members have on the chairperson hubris and firm internationalization relationships.

Although literature exists on drivers of internationalization, micro-foundations theories such as chairperson hubris have been less explored in the international business literature, especially in the context of emerging markets.

Top executive hubris is associated with positive/negative outcome. Little is known about the antecedent of hubris in top management team (TMT) and how they can be weakened to capitalize on TMT size and market complexity. This paper aims to address these issues.

This study draws on the social information processing theory. Subsequently, it proposes and tests an inverted U-shaped relationship between task-related faultlines and top executive hubris. Top management team size and complexity can weaken the relationship between them. Panel data were collected longitudinally from 2011 to 2016 on China's listed firm on growth enterprises board.

Hierarchical regression analyses indicate that medium task-related faultlines experience stronger than weak and strong faultlines. TMT size and market complexity can weaken the inverted U-shaped relationship between them.

This study provides pioneering evidence for an inverted U-shaped relationship between task-related faultlines and top executive hubris. These findings inform practice by suggesting a tipping point of team faultlines.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which hubristic behaviour on the part of Thomas Farrow contributed to the downfall of Farrow's Bank in 1920.

The article traces the way in which Thomas Farrow's behaviour changed over the course of his managerial career using primary sources obtained from various British archives, including: court records, witness statements, auditors' reports, newspapers, journals, and personal letters. The article then evaluates Farrow's actions in relation to the criteria outlined in Petit and Bollaert's “Framework for diagnosing CEO hubris” so as to assess how far he can be said to have become afflicted by managerial hubris.

All the collected evidence points to the conclusion that Thomas Farrow had, by the time of the Bank's collapse in 1920, become afflicted by managerial hubris. This was reflected most clearly in the fact that he increasingly came to view himself as being somehow above and beyond the laws of the wider community. As a result, he felt little compunction about fraudulently writing-up the Bank's assets so as to cover the huge losses that his reckless investments had produced.

The Farrow's Bank episode confirms that the probability of management hubris materialising is enhanced when external control mechanisms are either lacking or inefficiently applied. On top of this, the amateurish organizational set-up of the Bank also suggests that the likelihood of hubris syndrome developing is enhanced when organizations themselves grant too much discretion to their leaders.

The paper breaks new ground by applying the latest management and psychology theories on the subject of leadership hubris to the field of financial management. Its value lies in the fact that it provides scholars and practitioners with an in-depth insight into how hubris syndrome can develop in organizational settings.

How can a manager lead an organization or a team in a particularly turbulent time? How can management cope with chaos and uncertainty? Drawing on behavioral strategy theory, this study aims at investigating how hubristic managers can enable organizations to thrive, even over small time periods, in chaotic and uncertain contexts and settings.

This study uses a qualitative methodology to explore the possible positive effects of hubris in a behavioral strategy. In particular, 45 interviews with leaders and followers of particularly high-performing secondary schools have been administered to try to fully understand the origin, process and performance evolution of organizations led by hubristic managers.

The results showed that, in chaotic and uncertain times, hubris can prove to be a trump card for managers in dealing with the pitfalls and uncertainties of the context in which the organization operates. Three major attributes were identified – overconfidence and over-persistence, recklessness and contempt for critical feedback – defining the positive behavioral strategies implemented by hubristic managers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to highlight, by means of qualitative methodologies, the positive managerial hubristic-behavioral strategy during turbulent times in the school sector.

Serial crowdfunding is becoming a common phenomenon as entrepreneurs repeatedly return to online crowdfunding to raise capital. In this study, the authors focus attention on serial crowdfunders, that is, entrepreneurs who experience launching more than one crowdfunding project. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of past experience on subsequent crowdfunding performance. This study also examines whether initial success vs initial failure leads serial crowdfunders to engage in more explorative behaviors (i.e. switching industry) and to take exploitative actions (i.e. adjusting campaign strategies in terms of goal setting and funding option).

Data on serial crowdfunding projects was retrieved from Indiegogo platform. The logistic regression models are estimated to assess the impact of past entrepreneurial experience on subsequent crowdfunding decisions, and to estimate the effects of the three strategies on subsequent funding performance.

The results show that serial creators who experienced successful initial crowdfunding are more likely to explore a new industry or product category in the crowdfunding market and to set a higher target capital for the subsequent campaign when they change a project category.

Despite the fact that there are a considerably large number of serial crowdfunders in crowdfunding market, relatively little research has been conducted to investigate the presence of learning benefits from a previous to a subsequent crowdfunding project. Two competing hypotheses, drawn from the attribution theory and hubris theory of entrepreneurship, were tested in this study to determine the impact of prior success vs failure experience on both subsequent crowdfunding decisions and funding performance.

This paper explores how the tension between a firm's CEO overconfidence feature and externally observable hubris attribute may determine the level of corporate sustainability performance. This work also contemplates the impact of the moderator “corporate governance practices.”

This study uses a sample of 658 firm-year-observations using a sample of European real estate firms indexed on Stoxx Europe 600 Index from 2006 to 2019. To test the developed hypotheses, feasible generalized least square (FGLS) regression is applied.

Findings suggest that a good corporate governance score strengthens the positive effect of the psychological bias (CEO overconfidence) on corporate sustainability performance while it fails to attenuate the negative effect of the cognitive bias (CEO hubris).

The research provides an overview of the impact of CEO personality traits on the corporate sustainability performance level in the European real estate sup-sector. As corporate governance can have a major impact to control these traits, the authors recommend European real estate companies to improve their corporate governance practices.

This study contributes to the existent literature this gap with two empirical novelties: (1) providing a novel insight into sustainability involvement using a sample of European real estate sup-sector and (2) investigating the moderating effect on the link between CEO psychological and cognitive biases and sustainability performance. This study provides empirical evidence that entrenchment problems arising from CEO hubris would not be mitigated by a good corporate governance practice.