Relative supervisor education and worker well-being

Abstract

PurposeLess educated supervisors create worker status incongruence, a violation of social norms that signals advancement uncertainty and job ambiguity for workers, and leads to negative behavioral and well-being outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to compare education levels of supervisors with their workers and measure the correlation between relative supervisor education and worker job satisfaction.Design/methodology/approachUsing the only wave of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that identifies education levels of both supervisor and worker, a series of ordered probit estimates describe the relationship between supervisor education levels and subordinate worker well-being. Extensive controls, sub-sample estimates and a control for sorting confirm the estimates.FindingsWorker well-being is negatively correlated with having a less educated supervisor and positively correlated with having a more educated supervisor. This result is robust to a number of alternative specifications. In sub-sample estimates, workers highly placed in an organization’s hierarchy do not exhibit reduced well-being with less educated supervisors.Research limitations/implicationsA limitation is the inability to control for worker fixed effects, which may introduce omitted variable bias into the estimates.Originality/valueThe paper is the first to introduce relative supervisor–worker education level as a determinant of worker well-being.