Digital Collaboration Technologies and Managerial Intensity in U.S. Corporations: An Examination

The authors argue that digital collaboration technologies (DCTs) reduce supervisory burden on managers and should therefore lower managerial intensity. To test their argument, they apply a differences-in-differences design on a novel dataset built from firms’ job listings (Lightcast) and employees’ social profiles (Revelio), which comprises 3,017 US public firms that they track in the period 2010-2019. The authors find that, over the observation window, DCT adopters indeed show a 0.8% reduction in managerial intensity on average. Consistent with their argument that DCTs reduce supervisory burden, adopters also show a 5-7% increase in decentralization related skills in their job postings in the years following adoption. The authors also find that DCT adopters scaled up with fewer and less skilled managers.