Family‐supportive supervisor behaviors: A review and recommendations for research and practice

• Author: Shalyn C. Stevens,Tori L. Crain
• Date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2320
• Published date: 01 September 2018

THE JOB ANNUAL REVIEW

Family‐supportive supervisor behaviors: A review and

recommendations for research and practice

Tori L. Crain |Shalyn C. Stevens

Department of Psychology, Colorado State

University, Fort Collins, Colorado

Correspondence

Tori L. Crain and Shalyn C. Stevens,

Department of Psychology, Colorado State

University, Fort Collins, CO.

Email: tori.crain@colostate.edu; shalyn.

stevens@colostate.edu

Funding information

National Institute of Occupational Safety and

Health in the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention, Grant/Award Number:

T42OH009229

Summary

Family‐supportive supervisors empathize with employees' attempts to balance work

and nonwork, while also actively facilitating employees' ability to manage work and

nonwork demands. Over the last three decades, approximately 60 publications have

investigated family‐supportive supervisor behavior (FSSB), with one third of these

appearing in just the last 3 years. Thus, as the burgeoning FSSB literature continues

to develop, there is a critical need to understand this body of work in totality in order

to further advance theory, expand empirical investigation of the construct, and

facilitate the practical dissemination of FSSB‐related information into organizational

settings. We conduct the first comprehensive and systematic review of the FSSB

literature to date. More specifically, we discuss early formative work establishing

the construct of FSSB, existing theory, antecedents, outcomes, moderators, and

interventions. Lastly, we provide a number of future directions for this subject area

related to construct clarification, theory, expanding the FSSB nomological network,

methodology, and interventions.

KEYWORDS

family‐supportive supervisor behaviors, FSSB, social support, work–nonwork interface

1|INTRODUCTION

Changing workforce demographics (e.g., increasing numbers of female

workers, individuals with multiple caregiving responsibilities) coupled

with the evolving nature of work (e.g., movement towards a 24/7

economy, enhanced role of technology) are in large part responsible

for a marked increase in the prevalence of work conflicting with non-

work life, and vice versa, over the last three decades (e.g., Hammer &

Zimmerman, 2011; Montez, Sabbath, Glymour, & Berkman, 2014).

Thus, there is a need for both supportive workplace policies and

support from supervisors that can aid employees in managing

their competing responsibilities across work and nonwork domains.

Although national and organizational policy reform is undoubtedly

much needed, a rapidly growing emphasis has also been placed in

recent years on the critical role of support for nonwork life exhibited

by supervisors in the workplace.

Family‐supportive supervisors acknowledge their employees' non-

work lives and help to facilitate the managing of work and nonwork

responsibilities (e.g., Hammer, Kossek, Yragui, Bodner, & Hanson,

2009; Thomas & Ganster, 1995). Although more than 20 years has

passed since Thomas and Ganster's (1995) seminal study introducing

and identifying the role of family‐supportive supervisors, a burgeoning

literature on the topic has been emerging and picked up speed primar-

ily within the last decade. To date, approximately 60 publications have

explicitly measured family‐supportive supervisor behavior (FSSB), with

one third of these appearing in just the last 3 years, signaling that

research studies focused on FSSB continue to be prioritized by

work–family scholars.

However, a comprehensive analysis of this existing body of FSSB

literature has yet to be conducted, thereby limiting our ability to cap-

italize on the existing work and make significant advancements related

to theory development, empirical investigations, and practical dissem-

ination of information where it is needed in diverse organizational

settings. A review of the FSSB literature is timely as work–nonwork

integration issues and solutions are considered a top priority for our

field by organizational scientists and practitioners, having been

Received: 2 December 2016 Revised: 1 May 2018 Accepted: 23 June 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2320

J Organ Behav. 2018;39:869–888. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 869

included in the Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology's

Top 10 WorkplaceTrends List for the third year in a row. A systematic

review with resultant guiding recommendations for the most needed

innovations in research could effectively and efficiently shape the

future of the field. As such, we conduct the first systematic review

of the current FSSB literature. Although earlier conceptual pieces

(Hammer, Kossek, Zimmerman, & Daniels, 2007) and theoretical

frameworks (Straub, 2012) have been put forward, no efforts to date

have investigated the literature in an exhaustive fashion or critiqued

the studies in totality and thus do not provide specific and holistic

guiding recommendations for the next wave of FSSB investigation.

2|FORMATIVE WORK ESTABLISHING THE

CONSTRUCT OF FSSB

2.1 |Definitions and construct dimensions

Hammer et al. (2009) provided evidence for different dimensions of

FSSB, in addition to the superordinate construct of FSSB. The four

specific dimensions include emotional support (i.e., communication

indicating care and concern regarding employees' nonwork life),

instrumental support (i.e., reactively providing resources and services

through management transactions to assist employees with managing

work and nonwork on an individual and as‐needed basis), role model-

ing (i.e., exhibiting effective management of one's own work–nonwork

responsibilities), and creative work–family management (i.e., proactive

strategic efforts initiated by supervisors to improve employees' ability

to manage nonwork demands while additionally promoting employee

effectiveness at work). Although a handful of studies included mea-

sures of FSSB prior to Hammer et al.'s (2009) study, these earlier mea-

sures tended to solely tap the emotional support dimension (e.g.,

Clark, 2001; Thompson, Beauvais, & Lyness, 1999), whereas one mea-

sure additionally captured instrumental support (i.e., Shinn, Wong,

Simko, & Ortiz‐Torres, 1989). Thus, Hammer, Kossek, Bodner, and

Crain's (2013) scale covers the largest content domain of the con-

struct. More recently, Hammer et al. (2013) have provided validity evi-

dence for a four‐item short‐form version of the FSSB scale with one

item from each dimension that can be used to feasibly measure the

superordinate FSSB construct when the longer 14‐item measure can-

not feasibly be used and when distinct dimensions are not of interest.

2.2 |Conceptual clarification

FSSB is conceptually similar to a number of other support‐, supervi-

sor‐, and organizationally related constructs. We clearly delineate the

distinctness of FSSB while also clarifying the overlapping areas of

shared variance with other constructs based on theory and previous

empirical work. Kossek, Pichler, Bodner, and Hammer (2011) describe

that general workplace social support can be defined as the extent to

which employees perceive that individuals within the organization and

the organization itself are concerned with the employee's global well‐

being related to work and, thus, consequently provide helpful

resources to the employee. However, certain individuals within the

organization, such as supervisors or coworkers, can also provide work-

place social support. Moreover, workplace support may be content

general or content specific (i.e., work–family support). FSSB, then, is

a form of content‐specific support enacted by supervisors. Family‐

supportive organizational perceptions (FSOPs), on the other hand,

refer to employee perceptions that the larger organization shows con-

cern and provides resources that allow the employee to manage work

and family roles (Allen, 2001; Kossek et al., 2011). FSOPs should be

further distinguished from actual formal work–family policies and

programs that organizations implement, as past research suggests that

FSOP acts as a mediator between family‐friendly benefits and

outcome variables, such as work–family conflict (e.g., Allen, 2001).

Recent meta‐analytic evidence indicates that work–family‐spe-

cific types of support including FSSB and FSOPs are strongly

associated with work–family conflict when controlling for general

measures of support (Kossek et al., 2011). Furthermore, perceptions

of general supervisor support and FSSB are both negatively and signif-

icantly associated with work–family conflict through perceptions of

perceived work–family organizational support. Although some studies

have continued to conceptualize FSSB as an antecedent of FSOP (e.g.,

Hill, Matthews, & Walsh, 2016), other work has evaluated FSOP as an

antecedent of FSSB (e.g., Mills, Matthews, Henning, & Woo, 2014),

yet these studies tend to rely on cross‐sectional data, and thus, our

understanding of directionality based on these studies remains limited.

One remaining area of conceptual overlap exists between FSSB

and idiosyncratic deals or i‐deals, which are defined as “voluntary, per-

sonalized agreements of a nonstandard nature negotiated between

individual employees and their employers regarding terms that benefit

each party”(Rousseau, Ho, & Greenberg, 2006, p. 978). Examples may

include flexible work arrangements, such as condensed work days or

telecommuting. i‐deals are somewhat conceptually similar to the

instrumental support and creative work–family management dimen-

sions of FSSB, although we argue they are distinct concepts. The first

distinction is that i‐deals are proactively negotiated by employees,

rather than a supervisor, whereas instrumental support is a form of

reactive behavior on the supervisor'spart and creative work–family

management is a form of proactive behavior initiated by the supervisor.

Second, whereas all three may be beneficial for the employee and

employer, i‐deals are customizations of work arrangements based on

an individual worker's value; yet a supportive supervisor presumably

would provide instrumental support on an as‐needed basis to all

employees, regardless of their value. Creative work–family manage-

ment efforts are necessarily focused on jointly benefiting the organi-

zation and all members within a department equally. However, we

maintain that the FSSB and i‐deals literatures have yet to be fully

integrated, and thus, some conceptual overlap remains that should

be addressed in future theoretical and empirical work.

2.3 |Focus of support

It is important to point out that although the FSSB construct was

named as being family specific, the actual items from Hammer et al.'s

(2009, 2013) measures refer more generally to the nonwork domain,

and more recent intervention studies aiming to improve FSSB have

also more broadly targeted behaviors supporting employees' nonwork

lives (e.g., Hammer, Kossek, Anger, Bodner, & Zimmerman, 2011). For

example, items from Hammer et al.'s (2009, 2013) measures use

870 CRAIN AND STEVENS