Abstract Overconfident CEOs have been shown to lead their firms to achieve different outcomes, but the literature has only a limited understanding why this is the case. In this paper, we focus on whether overconfident CEOs run their firms differently, focusing on a key internal interaction: CEOs' choices regarding whether to delegate to other executives. Delegation is increasingly required given the growing size and complexity of public firms, yet surprisingly, most prior empirical work on delegation has been focused on lower‐level managers or non‐strategic tasks. We argue why overconfident CEOs would have a lower baseline tendency to delegate, and then posit how overconfidence interacts with contextual considerations, such that overconfident CEOs are less responsive to these cues than other CEOs. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 3690 merger and acquisition announcements and find evidence that overconfident CEOs are less likely to delegate compared to other CEOs and less responsive to multiple indicators at the task and firm level. Our paper's central contribution is that CEO overconfidence, a widely studied psychological trait in external risk‐taking and acquisitions, also shapes the internal management of firms via a different pattern and approach to delegating responsibility to other top executives.
Josefy et al. (Fri,) studied this question.