Excesso De Confiança E Controladoria : Um Estudo Envolvendo Práticas Orçamentárias (Over-Confidence and Controlling: A Study Involving Budgetary Practices)

The quest to understand the decision-making process, with the inclusion of cognitive aspects in organizational environments has provoked an increase of numerous studies in this area. At all times the human being is doing the action of making decisions, always envisioning the scope of a particular goal. Several factors can influence this process, such as their experience, information available beliefs. Psychological factors should be studied in the decision process, along with a discussion of the cognitive limits of rationality. Therefore, the existence of cognitive biases become very common in decision making and one of the most important is the presence of overconfidence. To conduct the present study, we adopted as initial guess the existence of overconfidence in budget processes, as well as the change in the level of bias according to the degree of involvement of individuals with related activities. For this, an experiment was conducted with 99 students of postgraduate courses in Salvador - Bahia. The results indicated the significant presence of overconfidence in the situations proposed by the experiment. Additionally, although not significantly, the evidence indicated that the higher the level of engagement with practices related to the budget process, the greater the overconfidence displayed by the respondents. These results corroborate the results of other empirical research in this area, contributing to a better understanding of the flaws in the existing cognitive processes of decision making related to the budget