Does My Boss's Gender Matter? Explaining Job Satisfaction and Employee Turnover in the Public Sector

Abstract

Substantial literatures exist examining public personnel turnover and the role of gender in public management. We bring these two strands of research together to test hypotheses concerning the impact of manager gender on the job satisfaction and turnover of public sector workers. In particular, we test whether manager gender influences satisfaction and turnover per se versus the competing claim that gender congruence between managers and employees, regardless of gender, is the relevant construct. Using data from a nationally representative sample of public school teachers and principals and employing a fixed effects design that implicitly compares male and female employees in the same school, we find evidence that supervisor gender matters for satisfaction and turnover. We also find important effects of gender congruence, which appear to be driven by lower satisfaction and greater turnover among male teachers with female principals.