Only one in eight managers is ‘bad’ – A new study suggests that British management might not be as poor as you’d think.

It’s easy to get the impression that UK plc has a management problem.

Links are regularly and quite reasonably drawn between sub-par productivity levels and poor management; study the business pages meanwhile and you’ll see swathes of stories of bosses stepping down, mistreating employees or failing to deliver on their targets. 

However a soon-to-be-published study may offer some relief. 

The paper by Cass Business School professor Amanda Goodall, alongside Warwick University’s Andrew Oswald and University of Wisconsin’s Benjamin Artz, examines a random selection of answers from 28,000 European employees who participated in the European Working Conditions survey in 2015.