?
Do Managers Matter: Evidence from E-sports
Growing importance of human resources places the role of managers at the core of
company efficiency. However, there are studies that demonstrate the efficiency of teams
without a manager, so-called self-managed teams, is higher comparing with managed
teams. Thus, despite the focus on managerial efficiency in the economic literature, the
issue of whether a team needs amanager is far from settled. In this paper, we use a quasiexperimental
setting from e-Sports (competitive video gaming) to understand whether
the hiring a manager is of benefit to team performance. The empirical part of the study
is based on endogenous switching regression model. This method allows investigating
what performance of self-managed team would be if it will have a manager and vice
versa. The dataset includes the information of prize money and features of top e-Sports
teams in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (e-Sports discipline) from 2013 to 2017. The
main finding of this study is that managed teams perform better than self-managed ones
but this is not due to the manager.