People Management Skills, Employee Attrition, and Manager Rewards: An Empirical Analysis

By M. Hoffman, S. Tadelis. Journal of Political Economy, 2020

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How much do a manager’s interpersonal skills with subordinates, which we call people management skills, affect employee outcomes? Are managers rewarded for having such skills? Using personnel data from a large high-tech firm, we show that survey-measured people management skills have a strong negative relation to employee turnover. A causal interpretation is reinforced by several research designs, including those exploiting new workers joining the firm and workers switching managers. However, people management skills do not consistently improve most observed nonattrition outcomes. Better people managers themselves receive higher subjective performance ratings, higher promotion rates, and larger salary increases.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/383da33ed6ebbf01dd572ddf55fb1816b57bcf8e

Citations in the corpus

• Management and Shocks to Worker Productivity (2019, unknown): “A few recent studies have sought to understand which particular practices or skills matter most, though much work remains to be done in this regard (Bandiera et al., 2017; Bloom et al., 2018a, 2016; Gosnell et al., 2019; Hoffman and Tadelis, 2018).”