Boss Competence and Worker Well-Being

Benjamin Artz, Amanda H. Goodall and Andrew Oswald

ILR Review, 2017, vol. 70, issue 2, 419-450

Abstract: Nearly all workers have a supervisor or “boss.†Yet little is known about how bosses influence the quality of employees’ lives. This study offers new evidence. First, the authors find that a boss’s technical competence is the single strongest predictor of a worker’s job satisfaction. Second, they demonstrate using longitudinal data, after controlling for fixed-effects, that even if a worker stays in the same job and workplace, a rise in the competence of a supervisor is associated with an improvement in the worker’s well-being. Third, the authors report a variety of robustness checks, including tentative instrumental variable results. These findings, which draw on U.S. and British data, contribute to an emerging literature on the role of “expert leaders†in organizations.

Keywords: job satisfaction; labor-management relations; organizational behavior; economics; workplace (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Boss Competence and Worker Well-being (2015)
Working Paper: Boss Competence and Worker Well-being (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ilrrev:v:70:y:2017:i:2:p:419-450

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