An examination of the relationships among self‐perception accuracy, self‐awareness, gender, and leader effectiveness

Abstract This article focuses on how membership in a self/rater agreement group (underraters, accurate raters, overraters) is related to self‐ratings and others' ratings of self‐awareness and leadership effectiveness. It also examines gender differences in the likelihood of self/rater agreement and in perceived self‐awareness. Finally, the article examines agreement group and gender differences in terms of two components of self‐awareness: knowledge of self and willingness to improve. Contrary to common belief, our research shows that women are not more likely to underrate their own skills on measures of leadership competency, and that gender differences do exist, both in rated self‐awareness and in one of its subcomponents, knowledge of self. In addition, this research found underraters were rated highest in self‐awareness by direct reports and highest in terms of overall leadership effectiveness. Managers who tend to overrate themselves compared to others' ratings were perceived as lowest of the three groups in both self‐awareness and effectiveness. © 1993 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.