The boss factor at play: bosses’ impact on life satisfaction

Here’s another fantastic dataset: the Civil Service People Survey results, by year and (separately) by department (with a couple of more granular questions not reported on). First of all, huge kudos to the Civil Service for publishing this. Secondly, what an interesting data set, of real public value.

The reason I was initially looking at these results was not to learn about the Civil Service, but to have some benchmarks that I needed in a charity setting. While no two organisations are the same, it was still useful to have some idea about, for example, what proportion of staff who say they have been bullied or harassed. [It’s not totally straightforward to find data on this. Two fairly recent surveys suggest that between a quarter and a third of staff have felt bullied or harassed at some point. Relative to this, the Civil Service seems to do pretty well: only 8% said they had been bullied or harassed, with another 5% preferring not to say.]

Doing further analysis on the dataset was also not motivated by understanding the Civil Service, but by testing some of my favourite hypotheses, especially about the boss factor. The argument goes something like this: bosses have an enormous impact on how satisfied people are — not not just with their jobs but with their overall lives; and the more satisfied, the more productive, motivated and resilient those people are. Hence, good bosses are good for the organisation and good for society.

Of course, to truly explore such arguments, one needs to analyse microdata at the individual level, and many researchers have looked at just that. [Indeed, this is where I first stumbled upon the pretty staggering result that 80% of your satisfaction with workplace relationships is explained by your boss; 40% of your job satisfaction is explained by your workplace relationships; and 25% of your entire life satisfaction is explained by your job satisfaction. So the boss really has a lot to answer for.]

With this dataset it was interesting to note how important senior management is in setting the tone and behaviours — and ultimately health and performance — of an organisation. Unfortunately, the data doesn’t ask people about their views about the performance of the organisation (and measuring government performance is particularly tricky, anyway.) To get around this, I used the statement that I felt was the least bad proxy for performance: “[My organisation] motivates me to help it achieve its objectives”. The other variable that correlates most with that statement is: “Overall, I have confidence in the decisions made by [my organisation’s senior managers]”. This tight relationship is clear in the bottom right hand panel of the chart shown.

The bottom left hand panel indicates that one’s immediate line manager matters, too. In this dataset, it seemed to matter less than senior management, but there were some interesting patterns. I have previously claimed that one of the easiest ways for managers to become “better” (i.e., to make their employees’ lives better and, as a consequence, improve an organisation’s performance and health) is to be grateful and recognise people’s efforts, regarless of how small the task or achievement. [This is called the “progress principle”.] Certainly, the degree to which people feel recognised by their managers explains a significant part of the variation in motivation levels between organisations [bottom left hand panel].

What does the data show about “life satisfaction”? Again, I’m very pleased to see that the Civil Service has decided to ask about this in their people survey — I’d say that is “best practice” and would recommend any organisation do this (not least because of the vast amount of data you can then delve into if you want to benchmark levels, or causes, of good or bad life satisfaction). Both the measures I’ve shown on the X-axis of the graph do also have a statistically very significant (p<.0001) association with overall life satisfaction. We have to be careful about claiming causality. However, this certainly supports the hypothesis that management’s behaviour has an impact on workers’ life satisfaction.

Very interestingly, in a simple correlation matrix, the two factors that pop up as ones with the highest explanatory power, when the dependent variable is life satisfaction, are the ones we have come to expect from literature: mental and physical health. After this, though, also interestingly, whether the organisation motivates the person (the same question as above) or inspires them to do their best are highly correlated with life satisfaction. Having an acceptable workload and being able to contribute views before decisions are made also feature strongly on the list.

One day, I will learn proper causal inference techniques, or at least econometrics that gets much closer to that, so I can potentially make some causal claims, rather than just look at correlations. For now, I’m just going to conclude that #dataisbeautiful and enjoy the fact that there is a lot of it out there.