Most leadership advice is based on anecdotal observation and basic common sense. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Kathryn Shaw tried a different tack: data-driven analysis.

Through research done in collaboration with a very large, undisclosed technology-based company that has a penchant for collecting data, Shaw found that employees who work under good bosses were more productive. “There are bad bosses out there,” she says, “but what’s not talked about as much is that there are also good bosses.”

Shaw, along with fellow Stanford GSB professor Edward Lazear and Harvard Business School’s Christopher Stanton, published a 2015 paper titled “The Value of Bosses,” in which they gathered data from the tech company in an attempt to see whether they could show that bosses matter and, if so, how much. As part of their research, the authors asked company employees and managers, “What are the traits of a good boss?” They found that bosses matter substantially.

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