“People Management Skills, Employee Attrition, and Manager Rewards: An Empirical Analysis”, 2021 (; similar):
How much do a manager’s interpersonal skills with subordinates, which we call people management skills, affect employee outcomes? Are managers rewarded for having such skills?
Using personnel data from a large high-tech firm, we show that survey-measured people management skills have a strong negative relation to employee turnover. A causal interpretation is reinforced by several research designs, including those exploiting new workers joining the firm and workers switching managers.
However, people management skills do not consistently improve most observed non-attrition outcomes. Better people managers themselves receive higher subjective performance ratings, higher promotion rates, and larger salary increases.
…Replacing a manager at the 10th percentile of people management skills with one at the 90th percentile reduces the total subordinate labor costs by 5% solely from lower hiring costs due to less attrition. [in human terms, this same shift (from a terrible manager to an excellent one) translates to a 60% reduction in turnover, with a bias towards “regretted” quits—employees the firm would have preferred to retain]