Your Incompetent Boss Is Making You Unhappy

HnT writes A new working paper shows strong support for what many have always suspected: your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being, way ahead of other factors such as education, earnings, job tenure and public vs. private sector. On top of other studies which have already demonstrated that happy workers are more productive workers (e.g. this 2012 paper.), it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world.

Comments

Peter Principle

[Solandri]

The Peter Principle is a concept in management theory in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in his or her current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."

The solution (assuming you're already in a state with incompetent managers) is to allow incompetent managers to be demoted back into a position they're competent in. Unfortunately, society has a huge bias against workplace demotion.

I Once Had A Boss Tell Us He 'Hates Computers.'

[Anonymous Coward]

He was a VP in charge of a large software development organization for a Fortune Five company subsidiary.

After a reorg, and this guy came in, he called the staff to his (large, well-appointed) office, and told us to note that he did not have a computer on his desk.

He mentioned that he was a lawyer, and disliked computers.

That was my 'résumé moment' at that company.

Needless to say, that subsidiary has long since gone the way of the dodo.

How about rotating the boss hat?

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Have a culture of rotating people in and out of management to "lower" positions. Like department heads at universities, the job lasts a year or two then you're back as a normal faculty.

I rotated in and out of a money management job, now I'm back doing technical stuff. As a result I have a very good understanding of that end of the business as well as the techical end.

--PM

Re:No shit,

[iamgnat]

Studying why people are unhappy in their jobs is worthwhile so that people can learn how to find jobs that they are happier in as happier workers tend to be more productive.

I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion though. Personally I find that my best managers were the ones that had little or no technical ability in the realm of what their staff did. They also happened to be the ones that actually understood the role of a manager and managed the team/projects on the whole rather than trying to get into the details. All the "knowledgeable" managers I've had fall into two equally bad (to me) categories. The first really doesn't know as much as they think and make life more difficult by injecting bad or wrong information into the process which (at best) drags things out or (at worst) makes the whole team look like a bunch of idiots that can't get their stories straight. The other group is those that actually do know their stuff, but they fall back to just doing it themselves rather than managing their team to get things done.

The real key is that the staff has to trust the manager to stay out of the low level details and the manager has to trust his staff to actually be competent at their jobs (and if not, do something proactive about it). Without the trust and everyone sticking to their actual role it all falls apart and people are miserable.