What's a
Boss Worth?
Quite a lot, it turns out.
Good bosses can have a multiplier effect that ups everyone’s game, according to
new research by Christopher Stanton.
We all have our boss
horror stories. The underminer. The bad communicator. The credit hog. The
snake. Then again, if we’re lucky, we’ve all had those amazing bosses as
well—the supervisor who encourages all employees to take their work up to the
next level; the manager who makes everyone around them look better.
But how much of an
effect does a good or bad boss have on workers, really? Harvard Business School
Assistant Professor Christopher
Stanton sets out to ask that question in The Value of Bosses, a paper recently
published in the Journal of Labor Economics—and finds out the answer is,
quite a lot.
Academics and
practitioners alike are interested in how to construct the best teams to get
the most productivity out of people working together. But comparatively little
attention has been placed on those people supervising teams. In part, that’s
because it’s difficult to separate the performance of the boss from the performance
of the individual workers he or she oversees.
“Bosses may get lucky
and have subordinates who can do their job well—or, in other settings, they can
get really unlucky and have one person who poisons the whole bunch,” says
Stanton, who co-wrote the study with Edward Lazear and Kathryn Shaw of the
Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he began the research as part of
his dissertation in 2011.
In order to isolate
the effects of bosses on workers, Stanton and coauthors worked with a
technology-based services company that tracked all of its workers’ transaction
times. Importantly, supervisors were rotated on an ongoing basis, so workers
would have different bosses every few months. Looking at the company’s data,
Stanton and colleagues discovered a wide range of worker performance.
“There was tremendous variety in the
productivity of workers doing the same task compared to other workers who
looked similar at the start,” Stanton says. But for particular workers, their
individual performance fluctuated in a predictable pattern according to which
boss they worked with at a given time—with some bosses just clearly better than
others. “In our setting, idiosyncratic effects of bosses on certain workers
were quite small—on average, Boss A was uniformly better than Boss B for
everyone.”
Measuring
boss quality
To measure boss
quality, the researchers looked at transaction times for the workers under them
on any given day (due to confidentiality agreements, he can’t say what the
transaction is—but a good analogy is the amount of time it takes for a grocery
clerk to ring up a customer; or a call center employee to troubleshoot a
customer’s problem). To a lesser extent, they also looked at the amount of time
employees actually spent with customers compared to other duties; and customer
surveys of worker quality.
When they examined all
of this data, they concluded that replacing a boss who was in the bottom 10
percent of the distribution with a boss who was in the top 10 percent had the
same effect as adding another whole worker to a nine-person team—a huge effect
for such a small variation in quality.
“That’s because the
effect of a boss is multiplicative,” says Stanton. “If you have a better boss
on a team, you get more out of each individual worker.”
As a consequence, it
may be tempting to assign more subordinates to better bosses. But that might
not always be the right recommendation. In situations where it’s important for
a boss to have dedicated one-on-one interactions with employees, there may be
diminishing returns when more workers are added to a team under his
supervision.
“You might be tempted
to fire the worst supervisor, and have the best supervisor take over that
person’s role for more people. That might create congestion effects,” he says.
“You don’t want the boss overseeing 100 people if they can only spend 5 minutes
a day with each person.”
Overall, however, the
effects of their study point to the outsized influence that supervisors up and
down the chain of command—not just upper managers or C-level executives—can
have on worker performance. “If you recognize that,” says Stanton, “it should
inform how you recruit people, promote people, and structure trial periods.”
Especially in work
situations where it may be difficult to fire managers after they are hired,
Stanton recommends companies think carefully about the screening procedures
they put in place, including longer trial periods to measure performance before
officially hiring a new manager.
“You need to have
provisional steps in place that allow you to determine whether the person will
be a good boss or not.”
What
makes a boss good or bad?
One thing that
Stanton’s study can’t say is what exactly makes a boss good or bad—whether its
education, experience, temperament or other systemic factors. Given the enormous
impact a boss can have, however, it’s an area ripe for future exploration.
“There is a growing
literature in the social sciences about the importance of peer effects—many
people think about how to form teams and what the right team should look like,”
says Stanton. But according to this data, the effects of substituting one
worker for another are actually relatively tiny compared to the effect of
substituting a boss.
“These results suggest
the most important peer is your supervisor.”
by
Michael Blanding
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/what-s-a-boss-worth?cid=spmailing-12811735-WK%20Newsletter%2003-30-2016%20(1)-March%2030,%202016
No comments:
Post a Comment