A recent study by researchers from China and the UK looked at the relationship between CEO hubris and corporate unethical behavior, specifically pollution. Using media-based evaluations of CEO hubris and firms’ appearance on the Pollution List, in a sample of 236 Chinese firms between 2015 and 2017 the researchers found that CEO hubris was significantly positively related to firm pollution. It was concluded that corporate governance mechanisms, such as decentralized decision-making processes on ecological responsibility, should be encouraged to combat the destructive effects of CEO hubris on firms’ polluting behaviour and combatting environmental degradation as a result of CEO recklessness.
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The American writer Roy Scranton writes in The New York Times that the technological hubris that brought about the unintended negative consequences of climate change could contain the seeds of destruction for the Anthropocene age.
At the CIPD’s Developing Line Managers Conference in London this week, delegates discussed the role that line managers can play, and the skills they need, in holding back hubristic bosses. The conference highlighted the unique pivot point position that line managers occupy, able to look upwards (to a potentially hubristic boss) and downwards (towards those likely to be affected by a hubristic boss’s actions). Being in this position gives line managers a buffering role and filtering function which could help to insulate those lower down the organization from the effects of hubristic senior leaders. Three key issues emerged at the Conference. First, if line managers are to play a role in holding-back hubristic bosses, they need to be able to know what they are looking for (i.e. overconfident, over-ambitious and reckless senior leader behavior that shows contempt for the advice and criticism of others). Second, amongst the key anti-hubris skills that line managers are likely to need are ‘gritty listening’ (for picking-up on top-down and bottom-up signals that might indicate a hubristic boss in the making) and ‘candid conversation skills’ (to help hubristic leaders see themselves as others see them). Third, in reining-in a hubristic leader, line managers need to be able to speak truth to power in an organizational culture that not only gives them the right to do so but also where it’s a responsibility of all those likely to be affected by the actions of a hubrist to speak-up and ‘say it’ when they ‘see it’.
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