Getting Their Hands Dirty: How Female Managers Motivate Female Worker Productivity Through Subordinate Scut Work

Using ethnographic, personnel, and experimental data from an Indian garment factory, this paper investigates whether and how manager gender affects female worker productivity. We find that female managers motivate greater female worker productivity than male managers by engaging in subordinate scut work , the practice of voluntarily getting one’s hands dirty to perform subordinates’ routine tasks, which increases subordinates’ engagement with their work. Our qualitative data help to generate hypotheses that we explore using personnel data on individual productivity and test causally using a laboratory-in-the-field experiment in which we randomly assign workers to supervisors and experimentally manipulate supervisors’ ability to perform subordinate scut work. This paper contributes to the literature on motivating worker productivity by drawing attention to the important role of manager gender and by studying a less-researched organization context—that of a female-dominated workplace. The paper also contributes to the literature on women in management by investigating their impact on worker performance, measured objectively, and uncovering subordinate scut work as a specific managerial practice that female managers can use to foster engagement with work and improve female worker productivity.