Harvard Gazette, You Want to be Boss. You Probably Won’t Be Good At It.:

One of the paper’s most surprising findings is that people who self-nominate to be managers perform worse than those randomly assigned. Why is that?

In the study, we randomly assign the role of manager. That was half of the experiment. In the other half, we asked people which role they wanted, and we assigned the role of manager to the people with the greatest preferences for being in charge.

We found that people with the greatest preference for being in charge are, on average, worse than randomly assigned managers. It’s hard to know exactly why because there are a lot of factors in play, but we show evidence in the paper that they are overconfident in their own capabilities, and they think they understand other people better than they do. We all know people like that.

This was a surprising finding. And it’s important, because interest in leadership plays a big role in how companies pick managers. Companies have their own hiring and employee evaluation policies of course — they don’t pick managers randomly like we did — but it’s surely true that preference for leadership plays a big part in who gets promoted to management. For example, we find that men are much more likely to prefer being in charge, but they aren’t any more effective than women in the role of manager.

The main lesson I take from this finding is that there’s a big difference between preferences and skills; just because you want to be a manager doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at it. Organizations that take more scientific or analytical approaches to identifying good managers are going to come out ahead.

Ben Weidmann (Harvard), Joseph Vecci (Gothenburg), Farah Said (Lahore), David J. Deming (Harvard) & Sonia R. Bhalotra (Warwick), How Do You Find a Good Manager? (NBER 32699) (July 2024):

This paper develops a novel method to identify the causal contribution of managers to team performance. The method requires repeated random assignment of managers to multiple teams and controls for individuals’ skills. A good manager is someone who consistently causes their team to produce more than the sum of their parts. Good managers have roughly twice the impact on team performance as good workers. People who nominate themselves to be in charge perform worse than managers appointed by lottery, in part because self-promoted managers are overconfident, especially about their social skills. Managerial performance is positively predicted by economic decision-making skill and fluid intelligence – but not gender, age, or ethnicity. Selecting managers on skills rather than demographics or preferences for leadership could substantially increase organizational productivity.