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While it seems intuitively obvious that good management is important to the success of an organization, perhaps that obvious point needs some evidence given how so many institutions seem to muddle through regardless. Enter Raffaela Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and co-leader of the Digital Reskilling Lab there. Working through several managerial mega-projects she co-founded, Sadun can both identify traits of successful management and even put a quantitative value to what good management can bring to a firm (spoiler alert – as Sadun will explain, it’s a big number).

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sadun discusses her research findings with host David Edmonds, who open his inquiry with a very basic question: What, exactly, do we mean by ‘management’?

“It’s a complicated answer,” Sadun replies. “I think that management is the consistent application of processes that relate to both the operations of the organization as well as the management of human resources. And at the end of the day, management is not that difficult. It’s being able to implement these processes and update them and sort of adapt them to the context of the organization.”

In a practical sense, that involves things like monitoring workers, solving problems and coordinating disparate activities, activities that ultimately require someone “to be in charge.” But not just anyone, Sadun details, and not just someone who happens to be higher up. “The most effective managers are the ones that are able to empower and get information and reliable information from their team, which is fundamentally a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down approach.”

If that sounds a little different from the adversarial relationship many expect between workers and managers, well, good management is a little different, she continues. “I can see how you can think of this as being a trade-off (profit versus well-being of workers), but if you look at the type of practices that we measure, as I said, they’re not exploitations, but they are ways to get people engaged and empowered to sort of participate into the work. It’s always possible that there are organizations that push so much on one side of the equation that make people very unhappy. In my experience, these type of situations are not sustainable.”

Good people – the ones employers prize — won’t put up with too much garbage. “Talented people are attracted–to the extent that they want to work for somebody else—they’re attracted to places where their life is not miserable.”

Sadun came to her conclusions through projects like the World Management Survey, which she co-founded two decades ago. “We spoke with more than 20,000 managers to date—around 35 countries, [and ..] collected typically [by] talking with middle managers.” Other big projects include the Executive Time Use Study, and MOPS-H, the first large-scale management survey in hospitals and one conducted in partnership with the US Census Bureau.  In her native Italy, Sadun was an economic adviser to the Italian government in the early 2020s, earning the highest honor possible from the government, the Grande Ufficiale dell’Ordine “Al Merito della Repubblica Italiana.” In the United States, serves as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Group in Organizational Economics, and is faculty co-chair of the Harvard Project on the Workforce.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

TRANSCRIPT

David Edmonds: I find it difficult to manage myself, let alone anybody else. But a vital key to success in organizations, both private and public, is good management. That at least is the evidence from research carried out by Raffaella Sadun. Italian-born Professor Sadun teaches at Harvard Business School. She focuses on how management affects productivity and growth.

Raffaella Sadun, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Raffaela Sadun: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure being here.

Edmonds: Well, Social Science Bites has been going over a decade now, and to my shame, we haven’t done a single interview on management. So, I don’t normally ask biographical questions, but I’m intrigued to know how you became interested in the subject.

Sadun: Great question. So, as you know, I’m an economist by training, and I actually did my PhD at the London School of Economics. I got interested in management because I was very interested as a PhD student in growth and in understanding why certain countries were able to grow consistently more than others. Gradually, my interest shifted from a country focus to a firm-level focus. What happens in countries depends on the activities of these units, which are firms and organizations. And then eventually, I realized that if I wanted to understand the productivity of organizations and firms, I needed to go deeper and understand what happened inside the black box. And that’s how I got interested in managing.

Edmonds: Okay, well, it’s obviously a very important subject. All of us at some stage will have experienced being managed, and obviously, a smaller proportion of us will have had to manage others. Can we define our terms? First, what counts is management?

Sadun: Great question. Actually, it’s a complicated answer. I think that management is the consistent application of processes that relate to both the operations of the organization as well as the management of human resources. And at the end of the day, management is not that difficult. It’s being able to implement these processes and update them and sort of adapt them to the context of the organization.

Edmonds: So that’s interesting. You mentioned resources, but doesn’t management necessarily have to involve power over other people?

Sadun: I think this is a misconception in the sense that the biggest role that managers and management doubt is actually a coordinating role. Monitoring this part of the story, that’s where the power element comes through, because you have a hierarchy. And typically, we think about a manager as somebody who has responsibility over others. But the monitoring role is only one piece of the equation. Why do you monitor and why do you collect data over the activity of others is because you want to first of all understand what’s happening. So, there is an element of problem-solving that goes into there. But you also want to coordinate the activities of the team and of the team inside the organization. Of course, there is a hierarchical element because somebody has to be in charge. But actually, the most effective managers are the ones that are able to empower and get information and reliable information from their team, which is fundamentally a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down approach.

Edmonds: OK, well, we’re definitely getting on to effectiveness. But managers will have multiple roles. Can you just give a sense of the variety of things that managers have to do?

Sadun: [Laughs.] Well, OK, if you want, I actually can give us some very specific data, because I did a time-use analysis of CEOs who are like, you know, the top managers. If you look at their calendars—we collected data on more than 1,000 CEOs