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Why Are There So Many Bad Bosses?
Podcast

Why Are There So Many Bad Bosses?

Stephen J. Dubner, Katie Johnson, Steve Tadelis, Kelly Shue and Nicholas Bloom
Freakonomics Radio, 2022
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9

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Concrete Examples
  • Engaging

Recommendation

If you’re good at your job, where can you go but up? And if you go up, will you find the limits of your capabilities? According to the Peter Principle, you’ll find that limit, perform badly in your new position, and languish in that post forever. It’s unfortunate that society has such a narrow definition of “moving up” in the workplace. In this episode of the Freakonomics Radio podcast, author and journalist Stephen Dubner explores the not-so-hidden side of bad bosses with a little help from some top researchers.

Take-Aways

  • Although employees have a good sense of how well their managers perform, science has failed to nail down the factors that make a good or bad boss.
  • The Peter Principle states that in an organizational hierarchy, people promoted to leadership positions will “rise to their level of incompetence.”
  • Research shows that the Peter Principle indeed affects real-life organizations, and that bad bosses have a negative effect on employee performance and retention.

About the Podcast

Stephen J. Dubner is the host of the Freakonomics Radio podcast, and the co-author of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics. In this episode, he interviews data scientist Katie Johnson; Kelly Shue, a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management; Steve Tadelis, an economics professor at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business; and Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom.

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