Uncovering the Behaviors Underlying Family-Supportive Supervision: Validation of a Behavioral Typology

Recognized as one of the most promising solutions for helping employees effectively navigate the work-family interface, a pressing challenge to be resolved in research and practice is understanding how supervisors actually 'do' family-supportive supervision (“FSSâ€). Despite the demonstrable value of employee-rated FSS shown for both individual and organizational outcomes, the literature has largely examined employees’ evaluations of FSS—leaving questions about the concrete behaviors supervisors engage in to provide this targeted family support. To address this limitation, we previously conducted a mixed methods study to generate a comprehensive inventory of FSS behaviors and organize these into a preliminary typological structure. In the current study, we build upon this by empirically validating our behavioral typology with a sample of 294 employees who were asked to rate where each behavior fell on the continuum of six different attributes. As expected, this evidenced two significant dimensions distinguishing supervisor actions by family orientation and effort. When taken together, this broadens the spectrum of known supportive and unsupportive behaviors that are relevant to contemporary employees and underlies the refined conceptual definition of FSS we propose. Further, the behavioral index and resultant typology are a foundational step in mitigating substantive conceptual (e.g., ambiguity; range restriction) and operationalization issues (e.g., confounded items) that have stemmed from the lack of clarity and parsimony in the extant study of FSS. These novel insights also lay the groundwork for advancing FSS research and its practical applications, such as serving as an important tool for managers and the development of training programs.