Hubris refers to an individual's display of self-assurance, pride or excessive confidence and has been presented in the extant literature to describe the language used by hubristic leaders. Therefore, this research explores the characteristic features of hubristic discourse in higher education and its potential link to the organisation's financial outcomes. By using computational linguistics to analyse written discourse samples of 20 Australian Vice-Chancellor's Addresses in the university's annual reports for the 10-year period, this research identifies linguistic markers of Vice-Chancellor hubris (increased use of negations, discrepancy words, power and achievement-oriented language) and their link to financial outcomes. As the role of the Vice-Chancellor has been compared in literature to that of the CEO, exploring if and how hubris’ symptoms manifest in language use can contribute towards explaining agency problems, accountability issues and the ongoing ethical debate over pay for performance in higher education. This research has implications for university key stakeholders such as government bodies, for standard setters who oversee the preparation of university financial reports and those who assume leadership roles within tertiary institutions.
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