In research regarding self-assessments versus assessment by others in highly competitive industries, I have found both people who overestimate and those who underestimate their abilities. The results indicate that high-performing individuals tend to underestimate their skills, whereas low-performing individuals tend to overestimate their skills. In addition, I have found that those who derail tend to overestimate their skills, whereas the fast-trackers and those who recover from impending derailment tend to underestimate their skills.
Why Jack Ring has "observed that when people in
a well-goaled business with highly visible customers rate themselves they tend to be overly critical of themselves. On the other hand people in a fuzzy business (a research lab, for example) who have no strong external measures tend to rate themselves more wonderful than others perceive," is probably due to businesses with good measures of performance either get the overestimators to adjust their self-evaluations or they weed out the resistant overestimators more quickly and thoroughly than businesses that do not have as good measures of performance.
If you would like copies of my research on this topic, please send me a note to my personal e-mail address that includes your postal address and I will send them to you.
Frank Shipper, Ph.D.
Professor of Management
Perdue School of Business
Salisbury State University
Salisbury, MD 21801
Phone (410) 543-6333
FAX (410) 546-6208
E-mail:
fmshipper@ssu.edu
Home Page: http://perdue.ssu.edu/~fmshippe/welcome.htm