Wanted: Self-doubting employees—Managers scoring positively on impostorism favor insecure employees in task delegation

• Impostor self-beliefs are prevalent among managers.
• Impostor self-beliefs bias managerial task delegation.
• Managers doubting their own abilities prefer insecure employees.

Impostorism denotes individuals who are successful in their jobs but who doubt their abilities relative to the demands of their jobs. This study analyzes to what extent impostorism affects leadership behavior of these individuals. A core component of leadership is task delegation, implying the empowerment of employees to take responsibility for more or less challenging projects. In a vignette study, N = 190 managers assigned both routine and challenging tasks to employees who allegedly possessed varying levels of self-confidence regarding their job-related abilities. Managers holding negative self-views of their own abilities and perceiving themselves as impostors in their jobs, preferred to delegate both challenging and routine tasks to employees whose self-views resembled those of the managers. This study clearly shows that managers' self-beliefs bias their task delegation decisions.