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Over the past two decades, scholars of management, finance, accounting, economics, and entrepreneurship have studied the concept and implications of executive confidence in diverse settings. Despite sustained scholarly attention, numerous definitions, interpretations, and operationalizations of executive confidence present a problem for understanding past research and informing future progress. Equally problematic is that past research remains scattered across multiple disciplines, lacking a cohesive and comprehensive integration. Based on an in-depth review of 118 executive confidence studies and 268 studies in the wider confidence literature, we marshal the literature into four overarching themes for an encompassing understanding: (i) conceptualization of executive confidence, (ii) governance mechanisms and pathways of influence, (iii) implications and outcomes, and (iv) origins and antecedents. We leverage the insights of our review to discuss a richer conceptualization of executive confidence and chart an agenda for future research across each of the four themes of our review.

We theorize about board decision making by introducing image theory, a descriptive theory of selection for decisions of more than routine importance, to research on CEO successor selection. We contend that directors’ current and future images of the firm typically revolve around their main responsibility, maximizing shareholder wealth. However, following discovery of misconduct, those images shift to the misconduct and to how it might be prevented. As such, ethical leadership dominates their criteria for a CEO successor. Evaluating candidates’ moral principles is nontrivial; there are few observable indicators. We develop arguments that, following organizational wrongdoing, directors are more likely to choose a CEO successor with a degree from a religiously affiliated university than they would under other conditions. We also find their intuition is correct: Choosing a CEO with a degree from a religious university reduces the likelihood of misconduct. In moderating analyses, we uncover a hidden irony: Directors in industries where misconduct is common are the least likely to choose, but the most likely to need, a CEO with a degree from a religious university. Results from analyses of S&P 1500 firms and a policy capturing study of actual directors support our hypotheses.

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