New research by Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Christopher Stanton points to the disproportionate effect of managers on people performance. A lot of effort often goes into constructing teams and considering what the right team should look like. But according to Stanton’s paper “The Value of Bosses”, recently published in the Journal of Labour Economics, the effect of a good manager is multiplicative; a better boss gets more out of each individual team member. The research showed that whilst the individual performance of some workers fluctuated in a predictable pattern depending on which boss they worked with, the best bosses get more out of everyone in the team. This disproportionate effect of a good leader reinforces the need for robust hiring processes to appoint the best leader possible.
Leaders Matter™.
Adapted from Harvard Business School article “What’s a Boss Worth”.
