Scholars have recently examined the adverse effects of top managers’ ingratiation on CEOs’ strategic behavior. However, these studies assume that ingratiation affects the strategic decisions of male and female CEOs alike. Therefore, we investigate whether top managers’ ingratiation differentially affects male and female CEOs’ strategic behavior through CEO overconfidence. We theorize that female CEOs cast a broader net while processing information and seek contrasting opinions from alternate sources in the absence of such inputs from the ingratiating manager. This prevents them from overestimating their own abilities and eliminates the downstream effects of ingratiation on their strategic decisions. Using conference call transcripts of S&P 1500 firms from 2007 to 2019, we measure top managers’ ingratiatory behavior through language style matching (LSM). We expect to find that female CEOs’ strategic decisions are less likely to be influenced by top manager’s ingratiation compared to male CEOs’. By testing the mediating role of CEO overconfidence, we also attempt to show that such a differential effect could be due to male and female CEOs’ relative ability to not overestimate themselves based on a top manager’s opinion conformity.
