Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus U., Germany
Even after decades of scholarly inquiry, CEO hubris continues to attract considerable attention from researchers and society at large. Yet, while the multitude of extant studies on CEO hubris, as well as reviews and meta-analyses, have contributed substantially to advancing our understanding of how CEOs’ excessive confidence in their abilities and judgments shapes organizational outcomes, important uncertainties remain. Reviews and meta-analyses provide valuable syntheses of existing knowledge, but they rely entirely on previous findings and cannot correct biases or idiosyncrasies present in previous studies, nor can they resolve questions about the robustness and generalizability of individual findings. To address this conjuncture, we replicate twelve influential studies on the organizational consequences of CEO hubris using a comprehensive panel dataset spanning the years 1996 to 2021 and employing multiple measures of CEO hubris. Following this replication, we outline inconsistencies, highlight broader implications, and document voids in our current understanding of hubristic CEOs. Our analysis reveals that only a small subset of the original studies can be replicated across hubris measures and timeframes, thus indicating important gaps in our current body of knowledge of CEO hubris. This highlights the need for further investigation into the generalizability and robustness of findings in this area.
