Leading by Example: The Impact of Female Supervisors on Worker Productivity

• In Event: 551 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Paper Sessions. Workplace Diversity: Demography, Policy and Practice

Abstract

Women are increasingly holding supervisory positions in organizations, and yet we know little about the impact of supervisor gender on worker productivity. In this paper, we draw on administrative and ethnographic data from a large garment factory in India, along with a novel lab-in-the-field experiment, to shed light on this question. First, we exploit within-worker changes in supervisor gender and panel models with worker fixed effects to causally estimate the impact of supervisor gender on daily worker productivity, as measured by high-frequency RFID devices. We find that when workers are assigned to female managers, their productivity increases by about 5%. Second, using ethnographic data we hypothesize that one key mechanism through which female supervisors motivate workers to perform better is by "getting their hands dirty" and directly participating in front-line work. In support of this hypothesis, our lab-in-the-field experiment shows that women supervisors outperform male supervisors in terms of worker productivity when they are allowed to participate in front-line work, though this difference disappears when supervisors are restricted from participating. Additionally, the experiment highlights that the mechanism of supervisory participation backfires when adopted by men. This paper contributes to our understanding of women in management positions by demonstrating their positive impact on worker productivity and by uncovering the gendered mechanism of supervisory participation in front-line work.

Authors

• Aruna Ranganathan, Stanford University

• Ranjitha Shivaram