What Do Managers Do? An Economist's Perspective

Alan Benson and Kathryn L. Shaw

No 33431, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Economic activity, when sufficiently ambitious, requires motivating and coordinating individuals to work toward a common goal. These aims are the purview of managers. What, however, do managers actually do? We outline three defining principles of economic research on managers and relate them to the set of skills reported by managers on LinkedIn. We highlight “managers of people” and “managers of projects” as a useful distinction for categorizing theoretical, empirical, and descriptive accounts of managers. In light of our three principles, we review research on how managers can create value— namely, by hiring, retaining, training, monitoring, evaluating, allocating, and supervising. We propose that managers apply these skills in different proportions depending on the production technology in which they are embedded and that research on managers should seek to produce generalizable insights by exploring managers’ contributions in different contexts.

JEL-codes: J30 J33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
Note: LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33431.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:33431

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33431
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().