The Link Between Power and Overconfidence

Question:

Discuss About The Include Overall Biasness Towards Confidence?

Power and over-confident decision-making are directly related to each other because often leaders in power take decisions without enquiring and taking advice. Thinking that they have enough experience and this leads to devastating results (Bratteteig and Wagner, 2012). The case of BP in 2009 is well known to everyone where overconfidence leads to the massive destruction in underwater. Oil was well located in the Gulf of Mexico which has potential risk associated with it, but the executive of BP confidently down played it. However, months later, an oil rig exploded which killed 11 workers and resulted in massive oil leak which reached to thousand miles underwater. This disaster could have avoided by taking safety precautions but the overconfidence of the executive who was in power, lead to this devastation. Therefore, it is said that power is generally co-related with the over-confident decision-making. Furthermore, this report describes the decision-making the process by power-holders over utilizing their experience. Basically, the present report describes how power can fuel up overconfidence which may result in bad decision-making by people in leadership positions (Tzeng and Huang, 2011). Moreover, the researcher has also pointed to a fundamental truth of the business world that decision-making can be hindered by unconstrained power and this is also applicable for a political leader as well and is not limited to only business leaders.

The three articles revolve around power and decision-making process and describe the nature and decision-making process of a human being. Therefore, these three articles can be named as human psychology. Moreover, this project report demonstrates the link between the effect of power and the human’s thought process. From this report, one can get information regarding the decision-making done by the power holders in overconfidence. Moreover, this assignment has been well-structured which will help the reader in getting the idea behind it (Cobb, 2016). Further, the report describes the summary of all the three articles and its analysis in deep. Furthermore, comparison of articles has been done on the basis of their key similarities and key differences. Along with that, on the basis of analysis, conclusion has been drawn of this topic.

There are basically three articles which have been analyzed in this report. The journal of these three articles is organizational behavior and human decision process in which first article is on Power and overconfident decision-making which have been written by Nathanael J. Fast, Niro Sivanathan, Nicole D. Mayer and Adam D. Gallinsky. Second is on Overconfidence: It depends on How, What, and Whom you ask which have been written by Joshua Klayman, Jack B. Soll, Claudia González-Vallejo, Sema Barlas. Lastly, the third article is written by Kelly E. See, Elizabeth W. Morrison, Naomi B. Rothman, Jack B. Soll: The detrimental effects of power on confidence, advice taking, and accuracy.

Experiments Conducted in Three Articles

First article which is on Power and over-confident decision-making basically describes the five experiments which have been done for demonstrating the fact that experiencing power may lead to making of overconfident decisions. This article has used multiple instances which prove the above stated fact. These instances are of power including episodic recall task which have been elaborated in experiments 1-3, then a measure of work related power have been described in experiment no. 4 and lastly, assignment to high and low power roles have been demonstrated in experiment no. 5. Moreover, explanation has been made about the power which can produce overconfident decisions and those decisions would generate monetary losses to the powerful. Moreover, this article has also demonstrated the central role which the sense of power plays in producing these decision-making tendencies. Moreover, in this article, experiments have been done and for the first experiment, sense of power has been tested and not mood and that has mediated the link among power and overconfidence. Then think link was served when access to power was not salient to the powerful and lastly it was experimented when the powerful were made to feel about the incompetency of their power.  

In second article, overconfidence has been described where overconfidence can occur depending upon how, what and to whom powerful person has asked about. It has been analyzed form the first article that the confidence which people have in their judgment often exceeds their accuracy and that overconfidence always get increase with the difficulty of task. However, there are certain analysis which has surprised the systematic psychological effects with statistical effects and that are inevitable in case judgments are not perfect. Thus, three experiments have been done in this article which has separated the systematic effects from the statically inevitable. Moreover, the article still describes the systematic differences between confidence and accuracy which include overall biasness towards overconfidence. Moreover, this article also explains the stable individual differences which describe some people, some domains and certain types of judgments are highly prone to overconfidence.

The third and the last article have been written on the detrimental effects of power on confidence, advice taking and accuracy. It is rightly said that to incorporate input from others can enhance decision quality; however, there are many people who do not effectively utilize it. For this aspect, this article investigates relationship across 4 studies and that are; a field survey in which working professionals are asked to rate their own power and confidence and that were rated by coworkers on their level of advice taking; an advice taking task was one in which power and confidence were self-reported; and lastly two advice taking task was conducted and in that power was manipulated. These results consistently showed negative relationship among power and advice taking. Moreover, fourth study also revealed the fact that higher power participants were less accurate. Therefore, it can be concluded form this study that most powerful decision maker can be least accurate.

Comparison of Similarities and Differences

There are three articles which need to be analyzed in this report in order to gain an insight about the topic in a more precise manner. Furthermore, the topics for this analysis revolve around power and overconfident decision-making. Moreover, these three articles have done experiments in their study where they have found out that often power leads to overconfident decision-making which result in massive destruction. Powerful leader always overrate their confidence and take decision without seeking advice from others thinking that they are the most experienced decision maker (Zhou, Chen and Liu, 2012). However, this leads to devastating outcome. Moreover, the article has described this study in a very well manner and also defined how power and overconfidence is interlinked with each other.

In first article, author has done 5 experiments for finding out the link between power and overconfident decision-making and with these 5 experiments author has demonstrated that power often leads in making overconfident decisions. In this article, author has used real life instances of power by including an episodic recall task, a measure of work-related power and assignment to high and low power roles. Furthermore, the author has provided enough theories to support his arguments which states that powerful perform always tend to take overconfident decisions. Along with that, proper calculation of mean and median has been done while doing experiments. It can be said that the proper calculations used in these experiments can be considered as its strength. The reason is that, it describes the linkage between power and overconfident decision-making. However, in this article, the author lacked in providing the clear information that is there every person in power do the same mistake or there are certain exceptions available in this field as well. Therefore, it can be regarded as the weakness of the article (Liao and et.al., 2011).

In second article, which is completely written on overconfidence and in that author has described about the dependency of it on how, what and whom the powerful person has asked to. It can be analyzed from this article that author has very well demonstrated the meaning of overconfidence and when it generally occurs. Author has also descried that certain analysis have astonished systematic psychological effects with statistical effects that are unavoidable if judgment is not done in a perfect way. Moreover, author has done three experiments in this article using new methods in order to separate systematic effects from statistical effects. Moreover, author has also described the outcomes which have been generated through three experiments in a proper manner so that reader can get insight about the subject in clear way. However, author lacks in linking this fact with any previous theory which cannot make it authentic.  

Key Findings of the Three Articles

Moreover, third article has been written over the detrimental effects of power on confidence, advice taking and accuracy. In this author has defined that how decisions can be made accurate if taken advice from others but often people lack at it. Further, author has conducted 4 studies to identify the relationship between power on confidence and advice taking. Through these studies, author has calculated results for proving this fact and that has been elaborated using good real life instances. Furthermore, author has also demonstrated of all the four studies separately (Fast and et.al., 2012). Moreover, through his study, author has proved that power can worsen the tendency for people to overweight their own initial judgment and most powerful decision makers could also be the least accurate. However, the author has not linked his studies with prior theories and that is what is lacking in this article.

Three articles have been analyzed above and it has been found that there are certain similarities as well as certain differences exist among three articles. Three articles can be compared on the basis of similarities and differences. Thus, key similarities and key differences have been mentioned as below:

1. All the three articles revolve around the same topic that is power and overconfident decision-making.
2. In all the three articles, author has mentioned the thought process of humans and how it gets affected when the person is in power.
3. Experiments have been conducted in all the three articles in order to prove the main topics of the articles.
4. Three articles reveal the truth that often powerful people tend to take decision in overconfidence and due to which devastating outcomes come. Moreover, they do not take advice due to their overconfidence and human tendency which results in disaster.

1. Two articles has done experiments for finding out their results, whereas, one article has carried out studies for identifying their solution.
2. Secondly, one article has linked its solution with previous theories; however, other two articles haven’t done so.
3. One article describes only overconfidence and does not provide the insight that only powerful person do this in overconfidence. On the other hand, other article states that people in power mainly do such thing.

Conclusion

From the above report it can be concluded that all the three articles basically discuss about the decisions taken in overconfidence can worsen the situation and it results in heavy losses for both decision maker and for the organization (Bruine de Bruin, Parker and Fischhoff, 2012). Moreover, experiments done in three articles have resulted that feeling of being powerful often exacerbates overconfidence and due to this decision maker never takes advice before making decision and this leads to the devastating outcomes. Along with that, by doing comparative analysis, it has been found out that there are certain similarities as well as differences between all three articles.

1. Organizations must analyze the complete organizations and finds out that people in power are following this tendency or not.
2. Company must educate the people about this fact and provide training to them to avoid such decisions. This will help in creating awareness inside the organization and worsen outcomes can be avoided by adopting such practice. For this, company can encourage more of brainstorming sessions, group discussion, meetings, etc.
3. A team should be made in charge who check all the decisions before implementation so that it can assessed that it has been taken whether in overconfidence or by taking advice. This will avoid destructive outcomes.

References

Bratteteig, T. and Wagner, I., 2012, August. Disentangling power and decision-making in participatory design. In Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers-Volume 1 (pp. 41-50). ACM.

Tzeng, G.H. and Huang, J.J., 2011. Multiple attribute decision-making: methods and applications. CRC press.

Cobb, J.A., 2016. How firms shape income inequality: Stakeholder power, executive decision-making, and the structuring of employment relationships. Academy of Management Review, 41(2), pp.324-348.

Zhou, L., Chen, H. and Liu, J., 2012. Generalized power aggregation operators and their applications in group decision-making. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 62(4), pp.989-999.

Liao, R. and et.al., 2011. An integrated decision-making model for condition assessment of power transformers using fuzzy approach and evidential reasoning. IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, 26(2), pp.1111-1118.

Fast, N.J. and et.al., 2012. Power and overconfident decision-making. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 117(2), pp.249-260.

Bruine de Bruin, W., Parker, A.M. and Fischhoff, B., 2012. Explaining adult age differences in decision?making competence. Journal of Behavioral Decision-making, 25(4), pp.352-360.