Competence: Is Your Boss Faking It?

Sometimes you don't have to know what you're doing — as long as you act like you do

Mitchell Haaseth / NBC

Incompetent? Perhaps. Actor Steve Carell as the boss on The Office

Bosses may be an overbearing breed, but more often than not, you've got to admire their business chops. Wouldn't you love to have that same sense of competence and confidence, that ability to assess tough problems and reach smart solutions on the fly? Guess what? So would they. If you have ever suspected that your boss isn't actually good enough at what he or she does to deserve the job in the first place, a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that you might be right.

Social psychologists know that one...

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