Making the Invisible Hand Visible: Managers and the Allocation of Workers to Jobs

Virginia Minni ()
Additional contact information
Virginia Minni: University of Chicago Booth School of Business

No 18137, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Why do managers matter for firm performance? This paper provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational firm. The data covers 200,000 white-collar workers and 30,000 managers over 10 years in 100 countries. I identify good managers by their speed of promotion and leverage exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams. I find that good managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through lateral and vertical transfers. This leads to large and persistent gains in workers’ career progression and productivity. My results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers’ specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers’ time at the firm.

Keywords: worker productivity; career trajectories; internal labor markets; managers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18137.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18137

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().