Promotion bias: why confidence wins over competence — and how to fix that for high-performing workers

Many Canadian employers say they are struggling to fill critical roles and build stronger leadership pipelines, especially in technical and knowledge‑intensive jobs.

Yet new research suggests a structural blind spot: organizations may be systematically overlooking high‑performing employees who are underconfident in their own abilities — including autistic workers — while rewarding those who simply look and sound confident.

In practical terms, many low‑performing employees are too confident, many high‑performing employees are too modest and autistic workers in particular are more likely to fall into the latter category.

That has significant consequences for how HR interprets self‑ratings, promotion interest and “executive presence," according to Braxton Hartman, research student at York University and paper co-author, which can also pose risks to employers.  

“Organizations will end up promoting the wrong people for the wrong reasons if self-promotion is rewarded more than actual performance,” he says.

“You’re going to get worse decisions, you're going to get resistance to feedback, preventable failures, leaders who consistently overestimate their abilities and are less likely to recognize gaps in their knowledge … it's trying to correct promotion systems that select for the wrong thing. It's not just the benefit for people who are autistic, it's a benefit for the organizations themselves.”

How confidence is confused with performance

The paper, “Reduced Susceptibility to the Dunning-Kruger Effect in Autistic Employees”, shows how high performers, especially autistic participants, tended to underestimate their own performance.

Joanna Goode, executive director of the Canadian Association for Supported Employment (CASE), says this disconnect between results and self‑perception can be amplified by how workplaces informally define “high performance.”

Instead of focusing on clear indicators tied to job outcomes, many organizations lean on generalized traits such as speaking style or apparent confidence when deciding who is ready for more responsibility.

“This definition of ‘high performing’ is often based on a generalized understanding of what high performance looks like, and that's not necessarily tied to what high performing in the job looks like,” Goode says.

“In our Western workplace culture, extroverts, people who are very fast, articulate, confident speakers are often seen as high performing, but that's really a function of their social acumen, not necessarily about their leadership skills.”

For autistic employees — and other underconfident but capable workers — this misalignment can be particularly costly, she adds. If senior leaders and managers equate quick, articulate contributions in meetings with capability and skill, they may miss quieter staff whose strengths show up in analysis, reliability or sound judgment rather than in how they speak.

Joanna Goode

Manager training for less confident employees

Hartman theorizes that social reward systems can drive part of the overconfidence seen in non‑autistic employees – while neurotypical individuals internalize and believe positive social reinforcement they receive, autistic individuals do not.

“We know that autistic people on average are less driven by those social rewards,” Hartman says, “and have a greater proclivity to focus on sort of concrete details.”

He suggests that manager training should explicitly address the asymmetry revealed in the their research.

“Rather than just training autistic people to try to act more ‘manipulative’ and ‘normal,’ maybe part of this is also training managers to go in the other direction,” Hartman says.

“Train managers on how this ‘asymmetric bias’ works. Have maybe a module that managers could go do, where we say, ‘Some high performers systematically underestimate themselves, and some low performers systematically overestimate themselves, and your job as a manager is to figure out who's who.”

He also suggests modifying language often used in job postings and promotion announcements, where words like “confident,” “strong executive presence,” and “self-starter” are associated with the ideal candidate.

York researcher Lorne Hartman, co-author of the paper (and also Braxton Hartman’s father), adds that beyond manager training and education, regular, behaviour‑based performance information can help counteract overconfidence and support more accurate judgments of competence.

What that means for hiring, says Lorne Hartman, is putting more weight on observable work behaviour than on how candidates talk about their abilities.

“Rather than asking people about their skills or doing a traditional interview, a work sample or a simulation where you ask the individual to perform a task,” he says.

“Simulations are probably more predictive of future performance than even a structured behaviourally focused interview where you ask somebody: ‘Tell me about a time when you had to influence a group of peers’ and the person has to tell a story.”

For autistic applicants, whom the study suggests are less driven by social desirability and more focused on task details, this kind of assessment can provide a fairer platform to demonstrate strengths. It also protects employers against overconfident candidates whose interview performance may not translate into job performance, a risk that is highlighted by the overestimation patterns in the low‑performance group.

Performance expectations and clear definitions of success

The researchers emphasize that their metacognitive findings are measure‑dependent and task‑specific – meaning HR can’t generalize their takeaway and apply broad strokes measures.

Rather, Goode says employers should focus on combining individualized performance conversations with structured, job‑specific criteria; this can help avoid collapsing diverse experiences into a single narrative about what autistic employees can or cannot do, she says.

Up‑to‑date, accurate job descriptions are another part of that foundation. Goode recommends employers should “make sure that job descriptions are updated regularly, reflect the reality of a position, and what success looks like in that position.”

As Harley Glassman, graduate research student at Toronto Metropolitan University and co‑author of the paper, adds, employees who are already inclined to underestimate themselves – particularly at higher performance levels – may self‑select into roles below their skill level or hesitate to push for more responsibility.

“Many individuals with autism end up in positions that they're overqualified for, because a lot of the time they look for work that is below their skill level and they kind of tend to underestimate their own abilities,” he explains.

“So I think the important point is also 'How do we get autistic individuals in the appropriate position to begin with?'”

Glassman adds that a subset of autistic people have highly developed skills that standard hiring processes can miss.

“They might show exceptional skills in certain areas most employers might not pick up on,” he says – while neurotypical or more confident applicants might be better at “marketing” themselves as ideal for the position, whether or not that is true.

“In reality they might be overestimating their abilities,” Glassman says. “For autistic people it's important to be able to demonstrate their skills in a way that isn't constrained by such social factors.”