Overconfidence in SMEs. Conceptualisations, Domains and Applications

As companies begin to look at how to start or improve upon their own businesses, there are several key factors to keep in mind. This book will focus on the managerial aspects to ensure the lasting of their businesses. The business world is rapidly changing and so must the tactics businesses deploy to their employees. Businesses are now noticing that older managerial tactics might not be coincide with their needs, which ultimately causes a road block for improvement. In order to overcome this, businesses need to first look at what type of management they need, as well as the ones who are fit for the job. A background in business, especially the business processes, is needed to understand what this book entails. Henceforth, the material covered in this book is targeted for those in the academics of business, practitioners, and students. The takeaway from this book is to have a better understanding of management with the aid of data to back up the claims this book will make with applied statistics. This book will cover a degree of explanations as to why certain characteristics of a management personal, or group, leads to success, or downfalls from Chap. 1, as well as uncontrollable factors play a critical role in deciding who or what type of manager they are in search for. The evidence collected from Chaps. 2 and 3 will provide a better insight through the use of statistics. This book is not limited to the business world, and expands its findings through other examples. The first chapter of this book, will provide a better understanding of what “overconfidence management” means, as well as provide a background understanding of the psyche behind it as well as some scenarios of common business practices. This chapter will focus on the difference between “overconfident management” and “optimistic management” through the Big Five Model, and focuses extensively on case analysis as to what experts believe makes or breaks a business from management. The second chapter takes on a different approach to this with the use of actual data in the business context. This chapter will go over four hypotheses, as well as identify major independent and dependent variables in hopes to find a correlation between those variables and the proposed hypotheses. The third and final chapter of this book, will take these findings to another domain by analyzing soccer teams, and how gender plays a critical role in how a person takes action. This chapter is meant to emphasize the findings from Chap. 2 in a different setting to see if there is a difference between activates, or if skills such as management can be used in other aspects of life. This book provides the reader with an array of insight from professional inputs and observations to understand the causal link between an overconfidence attitude and performance. It will also specifically investigate the SMEs realm as an environment mainly characterized by overconfident behaviors. Doing such, the book is directed to a wide public, practitioners, academics, and students. Overconfidence is a human personality trait that, we have all experienced directly or indirectly in every day of our life. When we plan things ahead and we set optimistic goals without thinking of possible delays, when we think, we will be able to meet a deadline and then we fail it or when we imagine to know more things that we actually know. To put it simple, overconfidence hampers the quality of our judgments like if we were wearing Sun colored eyeglasses. Even, when submitting the final draft of a project like this one, there overconfidence can kick in and then authors are forced to ask an unplanned deadline extension to the publisher prior to final submission. With the goal of unclosing the existence and extent of this phenomenon, the present manuscript systematizes the overconfidence construct theoretically and practically, showing its seriousness in business decisions and beyond. After reading the manuscript, the reader is empowered and will be able to learn strategically how to avoid too optimistic predictions.