VoxTalks Economics S9 Ep12: Management under the spotlight
Feb 18, 2026
Tom Schwantje, economist at Bocconi who studies management in low-income settings, and Simon Quinn, economist at Imperial College and CEPR focused on organizational behavior, discuss a studio experiment with Ethiopian young professionals. They explore how management traits were measured with recorded vignettes. They describe four distinct managerial styles and reveal which types employers and employees tend to prefer.
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Clear Rule-Based Managers Win Preference
- HR managers and employees strongly prefer a rule-based managerial style that enforces firm policies consistently.
- This preference beats more affiliative or discretionary styles in the study's Ethiopian sample.
Studio Role-Plays Revealed Real Manager Traits
- Researchers filmed young professionals in a studio acting as junior managers to create realistic management vignettes.
- The setup captured tone, authority claims, and decisions under pressure better than questionnaires.
Multi-Modal Coding Makes Managerial Traits Measurable
- The team combined human coding, AI transcription, text analysis and image cues to decode managerial behavior.
- Multi-modal analysis let them classify tone, authority, and facial valence at scale.