Third, ourmeasurements may be imperfect. Notably leader strategic competence is a self-assessed measure, which creates the possibility
that the senior managers over-estimate their leadership team. We have mitigated this possibility by asking them to assess strategic competences of the top management team, not their personal capabilities. However, as managers associate with their team, and people generally tend to over-estimate their own ability, this effect could create an upward bias in the competence measure. If this bias was nonrandom and in some way related to an unobserved variable (i.e., self confidence), then it might distort our results. While we acknowledge that our perceptional measure may be subject to such a bias, we contend that it mainly captures actual rather than imagined capabilities, and hence is closely related to the concept we are measuring, namely leader strategic competence. Future research may aim to separate actual capabilities from the psychological construct of self-confidence by measuring leader strategic competences through an assessment by an independent third party