Do Managers Matter? Management

More importantly, this is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study to focus on the effect of management practices on firm innovation in the form of digitalisation. [...] In addition, because the study is one of the first conducted in the post-Covid era, we can test for a relationship between good management practices and the extent to which employees work from home relative to the pre-pandemic era. [...] 4 Method and Data Survey Construction 4.1 To understand how management practices vary across firms in Northern Ireland, we construct a survey which closely follows the methodology of the ONS’s Management and Expectations Survey (MES), which in turn is based on the work of Bloom and Van Reenen.24 Our survey consists of 25 questions, answered by a member of management from any firm operating in Nort. [...] We measure complexity as the number of subsidiaries a firm has, and find a higher number of subsidiaries is associated with a 0.015 higher management score.29 6.7 In columns 6 and 7, we look at the effect of human capital on a firm’s management practices. [...] 6.11 We find that our measures of manager human capital – the proportion of managers having taken a leadership course, and the proportion of highly qualified managers – remain significant, and together account for the largest proportion of the explained variation in the management score, at 35 per cent.