Boss Competence and Worker Well-Being

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.