"The Value of Bosses"

That is the title by a new paper by Ed Lazear, Kathryn Shaw, and Christopher Stanton examining worker/supervisor relationships. They examine daily information from a large service company on 23,878 workers and 1,940 bosses for a total of 5.7 million worker-days: amazingly detailed data. They claim these data yield three major findings:

First, the choice of boss matters ... the average boss is about 1.75 times as productive as the average worker.  Second, boss’s primary activity is teaching skills that persist.  Third, efficient assignment allocates the better bosses to the better workers because good bosses increase the productivity of high quality workers by more than that of low quality workers.

Study Managerial Economics and become more efficient ... like a boss.