What is a Boss Worth?

Is having a boss really worth it? Here is an interesting question you might have for your employees. The National Bureau of Economic Research looked at this question. In a research paper entitled "The Value of Bosses" (Lazear, et.al.)this question was probed. The researchers found that when they looked at a very large service oriented company, the daily average productivity for 23,878 workers matched to 1,940 bosses over five years, the researchers found significant differences in bosses' productivity between the best and worst bosses. The researchers found that the average boss adds 1.75 times as much output as the average worker. They also determined that teaching is the boss's number one role. Bosses are to help employees gain persistent skills that will increasing productivity. Motivating employees to better outcomes was secondary. To purchase the rest of the article here is a link.  http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18317