“When a key responsibility of a manager is to allocate more or less attractive tasks, subordinates have an incentive to work hard and demonstrate their talents. As a new manager is less well informed, management dismissals reinvigorate this tournament competition—but only in sufficiently homogeneous teams. We investigate this hypothesis using a large dataset on dismissals of soccer coaches, whose main task is indeed the selection of players. We find that dismissals enhance performance (only) in homogeneous teams. Moreover, we show that there is typically a negative selection bias when evaluating succession effects, which reconciles previous contradictory findings. (JEL D22, J44, J63)”
That is from a newly-published article in the April 2016 issue of Economic Inquiry. The title of the article is “The Impact Of Managerial Change On Performance: The Role Of Team Heterogeneity” and it’s authored by Gerd Muehlheusser, Sandra Schneemann and Dirk Sliwka.
Cross posted at Market Power.
