If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You’re More Likely to Be Happy at Work

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“People don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses,” according to an old saw. Our research suggests there’s truth behind this saying: bosses matter far more for employee job satisfaction than any other factor we measured. But what makes someone a great boss?

Studies of leaders often focus on their style or charisma, but we wanted to look at how workers are affected by their boss’s technical competence. That is, is the boss is a real expert in the core business of the organization? How much expertise does he or she have? Boss competence is, admittedly, a multifaceted concept. Hence we measured it in three different ways:

• Whether the supervisor could, if necessary, do the employee’s job.
• Whether the supervisor worked his or her way up inside the company.
• The supervisor’s level of technical competence as assessed by a worker.