This chapter critiques the tendency to regard hubris within business organisations purely as a matter of excessive self-confidence. ‘Hubris’ is often used as a catch-all explanation for all business failure. The chapter therefore looks at other ingredients of hubris within business, including the concentration of excessive power in the hands of a few people at the top. These organisational factors are at least as important as psychological markers for hubris. The chapter identifies some widely held negative consequences of hubris, such as the unwise pursuit of mergers and acquisitions. It also explores some of the ways in which hubristic behaviours benefit individuals, including those who aspire to become CEOs. Examples are provided from the banking and finance sectors. These show a variety of destructive behaviours, including recklessness, contempt for critical feedback and abusive behaviour towards others. Finally, measures are suggested to limit the prevalence of hubris within business.

Hubris (in so many ways) is still with us: commentators and pundits still return repeatedly to this ancient Greek concept as a way of diagnosing the shortcomings of leadership and foresight that underpin contemporary political and business failures. These appeals to the notion of hubris rest on aspects of the ancient phenomenon that would have been familiar to an ancient theorist such as Aristotle. But beyond these popular understandings, hubris has become a term of art in contemporary academic approaches to leadership and management and is widely considered to have congeners and analogues in contemporary psychology. Yet these disciplines are rarely brought into dialogue with the intellectual history of classical Greece. This Introduction remedies that deficiency by outlining the approaches of contemporary classics, business and management studies and psychology and discussing the potential for each of these disciplines to draw and learn from the insights of the others.

Management scholars and psychologists have puzzled about how best to define, identify and measure hubris and hubristic tendencies, with only partial success. Such attempts try to help us see what lies behind the analogy between the ancient vice of hybris and its modern re-conceptualisation. In this chapter we explore how the processes of making metaphors work and how storytelling affects the teller and the audience. We examine what purposes storytelling serves, especially when its achieves a mythic character. We explore where aesthetics and literary theorising intersect with evolutionary psychology, and by connecting that to management studies. This leads to observations about the nature and practice of leadership that might signal hubris in the making. That might just help us see when the dark side of modern hubris snuffs out its bright-side potential, and perhaps how to prevent it doing so. This may help leaders learn when not to believe their own storytelling (or press releases).

The prototypical form of hybris in the Greek sources involved the self-assertion of the rich and powerful, which resulted in their disrespecting their subordinates in arrogating to themselves claims to respect they were not entitled to. This contribution looks at the flipside of this scenario, because hybris can also work in the opposite direction: from the bottom up. Hybris, that is, can also involve subordinates overstepping their position in the social hierarchy and arrogating to themselves prerogatives reserved for those higher up the social ladder. While denouncing the hybris of the powerful has egalitarian implications – it defends the right to equal respect (or at least to some respect) of those who are disrespected – denouncing the hybris of the downtrodden towards their superiors is a tool for maintaining and reproducing a social hierarchy by grounding it on an allegedly shared (yet heavily asymmetrical) recognition order.

As a cognitive bias, hubris leads entrepreneurs to overestimate both the likelihood of success and the contribution of firms’ resources to their success. Accordingly, in this chapter, we investigate how entrepreneurs’ hubris influences strategy formulation, performance attribution and responses to performance outcomes. We posit that heightened levels of  hubris in entrepreneurs diminish the significance of external performance in shaping strategy while amplifying the importance of relative performance. When evaluating performance, hubris plays a pivotal role: elevated levels of hubris lead entrepreneurs to attribute positive outcomes to themselves while shifting blame for negative outcomes onto external factors and others. In addition, we recognise that heightened hubris intensifies the commitment to chosen strategies, potentially escalating their pursuit despite adverse circumstances. In disentangling the effect of hubris bias in defining and interpreting firm performance, this chapter assists entrepreneurs in making more conscious and informed decisions.

The possible neural and neurochemical bases of the hubris syndrome are reviewed by considering relevant evidence from behavioural and cognitive neuroscience in relation to biological psychiatry. This multidisciplinary evidence includes studies of brain-damaged patients and functional neuroimaging and identifies the prefrontal cortex as a crucial region of a brain network undertaking decision-making. The prefrontal cortex is also identified as important for the subjective and behavioural expression of relevant personality traits such as narcissism and impulsivity. Factors that adversely affect so-called executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, such as stress, drug abuse and illness, are also taken into account to highlight possible neurochemical and endocrine influences. A novel hypothesis is presented which postulates a key role for the chronic stress of leadership status depleting monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline, which interact with pre-existing temperamental traits, to produce dysfunctional modulation of decision-making circuits controlled by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

This chapter focuses on Alcibiades’ love–hate relationship with the people of Athens to explore the notion of hybris in the context of leadership. Drawing on the social identity theory of leadership, I argue that the Athenians’ ambivalent attitude towards Alcibiades was a result of his complex interaction with two central aspects of Athenian social identity. Insofar as the Athenians perceived themselves as an imperialist and aristocratic city, Alcibiades was a ‘prototypical’ Athenian in that he embodied and articulated the most extreme form of Athenian imperialism. Insofar as the Athenians perceived themselves as ‘middling’ citizens, however, Alcibiades’ private and public conduct (couched by Thucydides in the language of transgression and hybris) was an affront to the dominant egalitarian political ethos. The analysis of Alcibiades’ mutable relationship with the Athenian people highlights the ways in which a leader’s hybris can manifest itself and how it can impact negatively on the leadership process.

Aristotle defines hybris as a way of mistreating (dishonouring) others. But he also emphasises its psychology, in ways that chime very well with the understanding of the concept in earlier literary sources. As well as indicating a failure to show other people the respect they deserve, hybris is a way of thinking too much of oneself. This affects one’s estimation of the role that luck plays in all human endeavour: the classic Aristotelian case is that of the rich, ‘lucky fools’ who think that their material good fortune is a sign that they excel in all respects; but ancient hybristai in general tend to develop the belief that they are invulnerable to the vagaries of fortune. In this way, hybris regularly entails a failure to deal adequately with risk. At the same time, it bears a relation to the myth of meritocracy, by which the fortunate convince themselves that their success is deserved.

Does power trigger hubris? We consider the effects of having power and the role of dispositions of power-holders on hubris and self-serving behaviour. Drawing on field and experimental research, we demonstrate that having power biases people’s self-concept in a hubristic manner. Power elevates confidence in oneself, one’s perceived competence and heightens self-esteem. Consequently, people in power communicate in a decisive and assertive manner, and so they are influential and have advantages in negotiations. Many feel entitled, take less advice from others, and neglect others’ perspectives. Crucially, the ways power affects people depends on power-holders’ dispositions and goals. People with dominant and hubristic inclinations are more likely to strive for, and reach positions of power. Such self-selection processes enable bad apples to emerge at the top, exuberating the dark side of hubristic behaviour often seen in the high echelons.

In contemporary discourse hubris is usually adduced as a dangerous state of mind, a form of pride or over-confidence which leads to downfall. This has its origins in the view once conventional among classicists that for ancient Greeks hybris was an arrogant disposition, offending the gods by exceeding mortal limits. This did not accommodate the fact that in many Greek states hybris was the term for a serious criminal offence, usually involving violence or sexual abuse. My Hybris (1992) successfully located the concept within the category of ‘honour’, and it is now widely agreed that hybris involved both arrogance and dishonouring behaviour towards others. Disagreement, however, persists over the balance to be struck between the two. This chapter reviews the debate, partially revises my earlier account (which underplayed the dispositional element) and insists that other-directed behaviour is equally essential to the concept. Using case studies from Sophocles and Herodotus, it concludes by restating the crucial distinction between hybris and related, but not necessarily pejorative, expressions such as pride or ‘thinking big/unmortal’ thoughts.

CEO hubris is a vital construct in research on the psychology of organisational decision-makers. Hubristic CEOs influence strategic decisions, from acquisitions to product and geographic market entry. To date, research has mainly focused on how and when CEO hubris impacts CEOs and their organisations. I offer a framework in which CEOs predisposed to inflated self-evaluation engage in behavioural processes that yield overconfident strategic decisions associated with hubris. The framework reviews and summarises how such evaluations stem from CEOs’ psychological and social circumstances. It then links inflated self-evaluation to the three drivers of over-confidence that are associated with hubris: over-estimation, or the tendency to exaggerate prospective outcomes; over-placement, or the tendency to rank one’s capabilities and situation ahead of others; and over-precision, or the tendency to issue unduly bounded or narrow forecasts which tend to be inaccurate. The framework is illustrated by the case study of Elizabeth Holmes, formerly founder and CEO of Theranos, who was lauded as a celebrity entrepreneur before being convicted of crimes associated with her hubris.