HCBE Mini Grant

upervisors in organizations play a critical role in how contemporary employees navigate the work-family interface. Family-supportive supervision (FSS) has historically been defined as the ways a supervisor displays support for employees to help them manage competing or conflicting demands between work and family (e.g., Allen, 2001; Hammer et al., 2007; Thomas & Ganster, 1990). Despite the extant literature revealing the value of perceived FSS (see Crain & Stevens, 2018, for a review), there is limited understanding of the concrete behaviors supervisors (do not) perform that influence employees’ capacity to effectively navigate the work-family interface and contribute to their support perceptions. In other words, we know that higher levels of perceived FSS matter for both organizational and employee health and wellbeing, but we do not yet know what that support looks like or how it manifests behaviorally from supervisors. Without identifying the specific supervisor behaviors responsible for employee family-supportive perceptions, our ability to devise strategies for training supervisors to effectively provide family-support is limited: both researchers and business leaders are constrained to observations of whether support perceptions are high or low without the ability to intentionally influence those perceptions.

In response to the problem identified above, this research is part of a larger investigative effort to identify and define the specific behaviors supervisors do (or do not) perform that translate into employee perceptions of family-support in organizations. We have already conducted three studies identifying the FSS behaviors and categorizing them into a behavioral typology. The fourth study for this grant collected an additional data set to test which of the behaviors most impact employee perceptions of perceived support.