Intuitively, HR pros just know that managers are important. Now, a new study has been able to quantify how much supervisors affect performance.

Removing a poor-performing boss and replacing him or her with a top-performing one is the equivalent of adding an extra person to a team.

That’s according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Researchers studied 23,878 workers who were matched to 1,940 bosses at large, service-oriented company from 2006 to 2010.

The researchers also found that the average boss is 1.75 times as productive as the average employee, and that good managers have a greater effect on high-performing staff than low-performing workers.

The takeaway: You may be better off firing a poorly performing manager instead of adding more staff to his or her ranks.

When that happens, productivity pushes will shift from getting more out of rank-and-file staff and more out of supervisors.

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