Seminar Management Style Under the Spotlight: Evidence from Studio Recordings

Abstract

We introduce a new method for measuring managerial traits of young professionals: using management vignettes in a video studio. Using a Bayesian hierarchical model, we identify four distinct managerial archetypes: ‘rule-based’, ‘affiliative’, ‘power-based’ and ‘discretion-based’. We find that past labour market exposure (including exposure induced through a previous field experiment) correlates strongly with the propensity to act as a rule-based manager. Incentivized experiments reveal that firms consistently prefer this rule-based style for entry-level roles. Our results highlight embodied managerial traits as a key mechanism for labor market exclusion and offer new avenues for studying the development of managerial talent.

With Girum Abebe, Marcel Fafchamps, Michael Koelle & Tom Schwantje.