Confidence-competence gap in leader selection
Groups pick leaders on displays of confidence, dominance and charisma, which are only loosely related to competence, so selection favours overconfident and often narcissistic candidates over more able but less self-promoting ones.
What drives it
Confidence is easy to see and competence is hard to judge, so groups use the visible cue. Experiments show that overconfident people are given more status even when they are no more accurate, and that groups rarely punish the overconfidence when it is exposed.
How it shows
Work
In the selected leader: fluent answers to every question, little doubt shown, credit claimed for team results, strong interviews followed by weak delivery. In a team or board doing the selecting: “she just didn’t seem like a leader” said of a quieter candidate with better results, decisions made on the interview performance, charisma mistaken for vision. As the leader: check whether your own hiring and promotion decisions favour people who are like you in style, and whether you trust the person who sounded certain over the one who named the risks.
Relationships
The same cue drives who gets heard in families: the sibling who speaks with certainty sets the family’s view of a business decision. In couples, the more confident partner’s account of shared history often becomes the official version.
Self
You feel reassured by someone’s certainty before you have checked their record, or you find yourself discounting a candidate because they admitted what they did not know.
What tells it apart
Dunning-Kruger effect: Dunning-Kruger concerns individuals misjudging their own ability; the confidence-competence gap concerns observers misjudging others by their confidence.
Halo effect: The halo effect is one good trait colouring judgement of all others; here the specific error is treating confidence as evidence of ability, and it persists even when the person’s results are visible.
Grandiose narcissism: Narcissism is one route to the overconfidence that gets rewarded, but many overconfident leaders are not narcissistic, and the gap is about the selectors’ error rather than the candidate’s personality.
A test
Score candidates on past results and structured evidence before anyone sees them present, then compare with the interview rankings.
Questions to carry
- Scored on past results before anyone presented, how do the candidates rank compared with after the interviews?
- Whom have I trusted for sounding sure, and what did their track record actually show?
How strong the research is
moderate. Robust evidence that overconfidence, extraversion and narcissism predict who emerges as a leader more than they predict effectiveness; Chamorro-Premuzic’s claims about gender build on this but are a synthesis and argument rather than a single tested finding.
Where it comes from
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, 2013 and 2019 (Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?); Cameron Anderson and colleagues, 2012; Emily Grijalva and colleagues, 2015
Sources
- Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It) (2019)