Article by John Van Reenen. Managers are more frequently the butt of jokes from TV shows like “The Office” to “Horrible Bosses,” than seen as drivers of growth. But maybe things are now changing. A new generation of empirical work has grown in the last decade that has been able to quantify some key components of basic management practices. Stuff like whether firms rigorously keep track of what goes on internally,  how they communicate this to employees and how this tracking is translated (or not) into sensible and stretching targets that can be used for continuous improvement. An important part of this is what human resources professionals focus on: Are these measures of performance linked to incentives over rewards and promotion? We have now run surveys in over 20,000 organizations in 34 countries and with strikingly uniform results: Namely, firms with high management scores perform better.  

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