How Do You Identify a Good Manager?

This paper develops a novel experimental method to identify the causal contribution of managers to team performance, and uses it to evaluate which characteristics predict managerial effectiveness and how manager selection mechanisms affect organizational outcomes.

The core identification challenge is that managers are not randomly assigned to teams in the field, and field managers are a highly non-random sample, making it difficult to infer which traits genuinely predict managerial performance. The authors address this by repeatedly randomly assigning managers to multiple teams in a controlled laboratory experiment, then estimating each manager’s average causal contribution to group output after conditioning on group members’ individual productive skills. The intuition is that a good manager is someone who consistently causes their team to produce more than the sum of their parts.

Farah Said | Macro Paper Warehouse

How Do You Identify a Good Manager?