Hibernate supports optimistic concurrency control, a mechanism that ensures data consistency in concurrent environments without acquiring locks. It relies on versioning to detect conflicts during updates. Each entity involved in optimistic locking has a version attribute that is checked during updates. If the version of an entity has changed since it was loaded, Hibernate throws an exception, indicating a concurrent modification. Optimistic concurrency control improves application scalability by allowing multiple transactions to work concurrently and reducing the chances of contention and deadlock compared to pessimistic locking.