If your boss could do your job, you’re more likely to be happy at work

“People don’t quit bad jobs; they quit bad bosses,” goes an old saying. Our research suggests there’s truth behind this: Bosses matter far more for employee job satisfaction than any other factor we measured. But what makes someone a great boss?

Studies of leaders often focus on their style or charisma, but we looked at how workers are affected by their boss’s technical competence: Is the boss a real expert in the core business of the organization? We measured competence three ways: whether the supervisor could do the employee’s job, whether he worked his way up in the company, and what his level of technical competence is, as assessed by a worker.

We found that employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the organization’s core activity. It’s not uncommon to hear people assert that it’s a bad idea to promote an engineer to lead other engineers, or an editor to lead other editors. A good manager doesn’t need technical expertise, the argument goes, but rather, a mix of qualities such as charisma, organizational skills and emotional intelligence. Those qualities matter, but the having technical expertise also matters enormously.

Research into expert leadership is growing. Evidence demonstrates, for example, that hospitals may do better if led by doctors rather than general managers, and that universities do better when led by top researchers rather than administrators.

We assessed the job satisfaction of 35,000 randomly selected employees in the U.S. and Britain. When we look closely at the data, a striking pattern emerges. The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction. For instance, among American workers, having a technically competent boss is considerably more important for employee job satisfaction than their salary.

Although many factors can contribute to workplace happiness — occupation, level of education, tenure and industry are also significant — they don’t come close to being as important as the boss’s technical competence. Moreover, we saw that when employees stayed in the same job but got a new boss who was technically competent, the employees’ job satisfaction rose.