‘Simply the best!’, How should e-leaders manage overconfidence among IT professionals?

The notion that IT professionals rate their competency ‘better than average’ provides a conundrum for both e-leaders and human resources development researchers. Findings from a survey of 158 South African IT professionals suggest that irrespective of ethnicity or gender, IT professionals will generally overestimate their competency for common abilities such as business, technical, and interpersonal skills and only moderately differ for estimates of ambiguous measures such as career performance. IT competency research and e-leadership practices may be at risk of advancing an overly generic and rudimentary conception of the IT professional. Perhaps it is not common competencies that determine if one performs well in e-leadership initiatives but some other factors. More significantly for e-leaders, these signs of overconfidence may partly explain historically high IT failures. The paper concludes with some implications for e-leadership practices, and future competency and overconfidence research in the IT field.