Nearly all workers have a supervisor or 'boss'. Yet there is almost no published research by economists into how bosses affect the quality of employees' lives. This study offers some of the first formal evidence. First, it is shown that a boss's technical competence is the single strongest...

Bosses play an important role in workplaces. Yet little is currently known about a foundational question. Are the right people promoted to be managers, team leaders, and supervisors? Gallup data and the famous Peter Principle both suggest that incompetent bosses are likely to be all around us....

We investigate how bonus payments affect satisfaction and performance of managers in a large, multinational company. We find that falling behind a naturally occurring reference point for bonus comparisons reduces satisfaction and subsequent performance. The effects tend to be mitigated if...

The positive role of transformational leadership for productivity and mental wellbeing has long been established. Transformational leadership behavior may be particularly suited to navigate times of crisis which are characterized by high levels of complexity and uncertainty. We exploit...

This paper investigates the job satisfaction in relation to managerial attitudes towards employees and firm size using the linked employer-employee survey results in Britain. We first investigate the management-employee relationships and the firm size using maximum likelihood probit estimation....

This paper uses linked employer-employee data to investigate the relationship between employees' subjective well-being and workplace performance in Britain. The analyses show a clear, positive and statistically-significant relationship between the average level of job satisfaction at the...

This study explores the impact of a particular low marginal-cost employee benefit on employees' intended retention and performance. By utilizing a unique data set constructed by surveying full-time faculty and staff members at a public university in the United States, we study the impact of this...

After the apparent rise of so‐called atypical and 'precarious' jobs, the quality of employment has become of interest because such employment relationships are often related to objectively or subjectively worse working conditions. In this paper we look in detail into what is known about job...

There has been a considerable amount of work focusing on job satisfaction and sex, generally finding that women are more satisfied than men despite having objectively worse job conditions. But there is little evidence on whether job satisfaction differs by race or ethnicity. We use data from the...

In this paper, I study an employment situation where the employer and the employees cooperate about the implementation of a job satisfaction survey. Cooperation is valuable because it improves the firm's ability to predict employee quits, but it is only an equilibrium outcome because the...