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Business
商业版块
Bartleby
巴托比专栏
Spot the boss
看到老板
What makes someone a good choice to be a manager?
什么让一个人适合当管理者？
The IgNobel awards, an annual ceremony for laugh-out-loud scientific papers, celebrate the joyfully improbable nature of much academic research.
搞笑诺贝尔奖是一个表彰令人捧腹大笑的科学论文的年度颁奖典礼，庆祝了许多学术研究给人带来欢乐的荒谬性。
One of this year’s IgNobel winners, “Factors involved in the ejection of milk”, was published in 1941 and tests whether fear causes cows to involuntarily drain their udders.
今年的搞笑诺贝尔奖的获奖者之一是《牛奶喷射涉及的因素》，发表于1941年，测试了恐惧是否会导致奶牛不受控制地排空乳房。
Its authors drew their conclusions by placing a cat on a cow’s back and repeatedly exploding paper bags beside it.
作者通过将一只猫放在奶牛背上，并在旁边反复引爆纸袋的方式得出了结论。
“Genetic determinism and hemispheric influence in hair whorl formation”, another winner, asks whether hair tends to swirl in the same direction depending on which hemisphere you live in.
《头发旋形成过程中的基因决定论和半球影响》是另一个获奖研究，探讨了头发是否会根据你生活在哪个半球而向同一方向旋转。
Sometimes you come across an academic paper that asks a deeply practical question in a refreshingly plain way.
有时你会遇到一篇以令人耳目一新的简单方式提出了一个非常实际的问题的学术论文。
“How do you find a good manager?”, a new study by Ben Weidmann of the Harvard Kennedy School and his co-authors, sits in this category.
《如何找到一位优秀的经理？》是哈佛大学肯尼迪学院的本·韦德曼及其合著者的一项新研究，这篇论文就属于这一类。
Answering that question well is important.
很好地回答这个问题是很重要的。
Other research, to say nothing of the experience of everybody everywhere, shows that variations in the quality of management help explain differences in performance between companies and even between countries.
其他研究，更不用说不同地方不同人的经验，表明管理质量的差异有助于解释公司之间甚至国家之间的表现差异。
Yet a survey conducted last year by the Chartered Management Institute in Britain found that four in every five people entering management had received no formal training.
然而，英国特许管理协会去年进行的一项调查发现，每五个进入管理层的人中就有四个人没有接受过正式培训。
And loads of bosses accrue managerial responsibilities for reasons unrelated to their ability to discharge them.
而且许多老板因为与履行管理职责的能力无关的原因而逐渐承担了很多管理职责。
Another paper, by Alan Benson of the Carlson School of Management and his co-authors, looked at the career paths of thousands of sales workers in over 200 American firms.
另一篇论文由卡尔森管理学院的艾伦·本森及其合著者撰写，研究了200多家美国公司数千名销售人员的职业道路。
They found that better sales performance increased the likelihood of people being promoted but was also associated with worse performance among their new subordinates.
他们发现，更好的销售业绩增加了晋升的可能性，但也与他们新下属的更差表现有关。
The “Peter Principle”, the idea that people rise up the ladder if they do their current job well until they reach a job at which they are incompetent, appears to be alive and well.
“彼得原理”（即如果人们在当前工作中表现出色，就会晋升到更高的职位，直到他们无法胜任为止）如今似乎仍然适用。
How then should managers be selected?
那么，应该如何选择管理者呢？
The study by Mr Weidmann et al sought to answer that question by running a series of repeated experiments in which participants were randomly assigned to three-person teams of one manager and two subordinates.
韦德曼等人的这项研究试图通过进行一系列重复实验来回答这个问题，在这些实验中，参与者被随机分配到由一名管理者和两名下属组成的三人团队中。
Each member of the team, including the manager, had to complete a number of problem-solving tasks.
团队中的每个成员，包括管理者，都必须完成一些解决问题的任务。
The manager’s job was to assign people to the task they were most suited to; monitor their performance and reassign them as needed; and keep them motivated.
管理者的工作是将人员分配到最适合他们的任务中，监控他们的表现并根据需要重新分配，以及保持他们的积极性。
In the real world bosses do more things, but this captures a big part of their role.
在现实世界中，老板做的事情更多，但这个实验涵盖了他们的大部分工作。
The researchers found that a competent manager had about twice as much impact on the team’s performance as a competent worker.
研究人员发现，一个胜任的管理者对团队绩效的影响大约是一个胜任的员工的两倍。
More usefully, they also found out which traits were associated with good and bad managerial performance.
更有用的是，他们还发现了哪些特质与良好和不良的管理表现相关。
Teams run by people who said they really, really wanted to be managers performed worse than those who were assigned to lead them by chance.
那些声称自己非常、非常想当管理者的人所领导的团队，其表现不如那些被偶然指派了管理者的团队。
Self-promoting types tended to be overconfident about their own abilities; in a huge shock, they also tended to be men.
自我推销的人往往对自己的能力过于自信，令人震惊的是，这些人也往往是男性。
If appointing a manager just because he sticks his hand up and says he can read people is not a great selection strategy, what would be better?
如果“仅仅因为一个人举手说他会识人就任命他当管理者”不是一个很好的选择策略，那么什么策略会更好呢？
The researchers found that good managerial outcomes were associated with certain skills.
研究人员发现，良好的管理成果与某些技能相关。
One in particular stood out: people who did well on a test of economic IQ developed by researchers at Harvard called the “assignment game”, in which you have to quickly spot patterns in the performance data of fictional workers and match them to the tasks they are best at.
其中一项技能尤其突出：哈佛大学研究人员设计了一项名为“分配游戏”的经济智商测试，在这个测试中，你必须快速发现虚拟工人的绩效数据中的规律，并将他们与其最擅长的任务相匹配，在这个游戏中表现出色就是突出技能。
(Anyone can play the game online: you end up with a percentile score and a mild headache.)
（任何人都可以在网上玩这个游戏：你最终会得到一个百分数的分数和轻微头痛。）
Since the assignment game is similar to the experiment in the study, you would expect people who were good at one to shine in the other.
由于分配游戏与研究中的实验相似，因此你会预期擅长其中一个的人在另一个中也表现出色。
But for David Deming, also of the Harvard Kennedy School and another of the paper’s authors, that is precisely the point.
但对于哈佛大学肯尼迪学院的大卫·戴明来说（他是论文的另一个作者），这正是问题的关键所在。
Management tasks can be identified, codified and incorporated into selection processes: that is a better way of choosing bosses than drawing only on those who thrust themselves forward or looking at how people perform in other jobs.
管理任务可以被识别、编码并纳入选拔过程：相比于仅仅挑选那些毛遂自荐的人，或仅仅观察人们在非管理工作中的表现的办法，这是一种更好的挑选老板的方式。
There are echoes here of a paper by Alessandro Pluchino of the University of Catania and his co-authors, who found that it was better to promote people at random than based on how well they did their current role.
这呼应了卡塔尼亚大学的亚历山德罗·普鲁奇诺及其合著者的一篇论文，他们发现，随机晋升人员比根据他们目前的表现晋升更好。
That won an IgNobel in 2010.
这篇论文在2010年获得了搞笑诺贝尔奖。
Just because something is funny doesn’t mean it should be dismissed.
某事有趣并不意味着这件事应该被一笑置之。
