According to a new research, an overconfident person can deceive others into believing in their perceived abilities and reach dominant positions at work, which can create problems for the company.
Moreover, such workers are also more prone to misjudge the abilities of their colleagues and take greater risks that can to trouble for the companies.
Researchers at the University of Exeter, England, found in their study that people who were less confident were often seen as less competent. They said that this is the first study to show that a person's perception of his or her own ability and how others see their capability might partially explain financial collapses and business disasters.
For the study, the researchers recruited 72 students. The participants were told to rate their own ability and the ability of their peers after the first day of class. The study results revealed that there existed a positive correlation between the scores students predicted for themselves and the scores others predicted for them.
The findings stated that those who estimated higher scores for themselves were also given higher scores by others. This was true in spite of the actual scores. The same thing was seen in under-confident students.
"These findings suggest that people don't always reward the most accomplished individual but rather the most self-deceived," researcher Vivek Nityananda of Newcastle University said in a press release.
"We think this supports an evolutionary theory of self-deception. It can be beneficial to have others believe you are better than you are and the best way to do this is to deceive yourself - which might be what we have evolved to do," Nityananda added. "This can cause problems as over confident people may also be more likely to take risks. So if too many people overrate themselves and deceive others about their abilities within organizations then this could lead to disastrous consequences such as airplane crashes or financial collapses."
According to researcher Shakti Lamba, if the overconfident people are risky, then the companies are putting themselves in a fix by promoting such employees.
The findings of the study were published in the journal PLOS ONE.
