Relative supervisor education and worker well-being

Benjamin Artz

International Journal of Manpower, 2018, vol. 39, issue 5, 731-745

Abstract: Purpose - Less educated supervisors create worker status incongruence, a violation of social norms that signals advancement uncertainty and job ambiguity for workers, and leads to negative behavioral and well-being outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to compare education levels of supervisors with their workers and measure the correlation between relative supervisor education and worker job satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach - Using the only wave of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that identifies education levels of both supervisor and worker, a series of ordered probit estimates describe the relationship between supervisor education levels and subordinate worker well-being. Extensive controls, sub-sample estimates and a control for sorting confirm the estimates. Findings - Worker well-being is negatively correlated with having a less educated supervisor and positively correlated with having a more educated supervisor. This result is robust to a number of alternative specifications. In sub-sample estimates, workers highly placed in an organization’s hierarchy do not exhibit reduced well-being with less educated supervisors. Research limitations/implications - A limitation is the inability to control for worker fixed effects, which may introduce omitted variable bias into the estimates. Originality/value - The paper is the first to introduce relative supervisor–worker education level as a determinant of worker well-being.

Keywords: Supervisor; Education; Job satisfaction; Status incongruence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:ijmpps:ijm-01-2017-0022

DOI: 10.1108/IJM-01-2017-0022

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