On the Allocation and Impacts of Managerial Training

Abstract

We study the allocation and productivity consequences of training production line supervisors in soft skills via a randomized controlled trial.Consistent with standard practice for training investments within firms, we asked middle managers --who sit above supervisors in the hierarchy --to nominate members of their supervisory team for training.Program access was randomized within these recommendation rankings.Highly recommended supervisors experienced no productivity gains; in contrast, less-recommended supervisors' productivity increased 12% relative to controls.This was not due to poor information or favoritism.Instead, consistent with the fact that supervisor turnover comes at a large effort cost to middle managers due to gaps in coverage and onboarding, middle managers prioritized retention over productivity impacts.Indeed, treated supervisors were 15% less likely to quit than controls; this gain was most pronounced for highly recommended supervisors.Misallocation of training can help explain the persistence of low managerial quality in firms.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.