Management and shocks to worker productivity
This journal article, published by the Journal of Political Economy, examines how managers respond to air pollution shocks by reallocating workers to reduce productivity losses and how managers' attentiveness affects their ability to adapt and maintain team performance. See the abstract below for details.
We study how managers mitigate the negative impacts of environmental shocks. Pairing productivity data from a garment firm with granular measures of air pollution, we show that productivity suffers as a result of pollution shocks but that managers respond by reallocating particularly sensitive workers to improve worker-to-task matches, thus mitigating team productivity losses. Responses are smaller for more inattentive managers; these same managers are also least able to mitigate productivity declines. These patterns are confirmed by leveraging variation in opportunities for reallocation and comparing how close managers of differing attentiveness can get to the simulated production frontier by reallocating workers.