When Family Supportive Supervisors Meet Employees’ Need for Caring: Implications for Work–Family Enrichment and Thriving

Abstract

This article presents two studies that examine the moderated multiple mediation model between Family Supportive Supervisors Behaviors (FSSB) and individual’s thriving at work through psychological availability and work–family enrichment at conditional levels of need for caring. Drawing on the Resource-Gain-Development framework and self-determination theory, the results of the 6-month time-lagged data demonstrate, in Study 1 (Italian sample = 156), that FSSB is associated with greater individual thriving at work via work–family enrichment and that this indirect relationship is significant exclusively for those who perceive a higher need for caring. In Study 2 (Chinese sample = 356), the results demonstrate the relationship between FSSB and thriving at work is serially mediated by both psychological availability and work–family enrichment at the conditional level of need for caring. In particular, the results demonstrate that individuals with a higher need for caring responded more favorably to the presence of a family supportive supervisor than those experiencing a lower need for caring. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

What threatens retail employees' thriving at work under leader‐member exchange? The role of store spatial crowding and team negative affective tone

“…Nevertheless, supervisors generally have intensive interactions with their employees, who stand as a prominent social context providing various resources to employees and affecting their levels of learning and vitality (e.g., Hildenbrand et al, 2018;Russo, Buonocore, Carmeli, & Guo, 2018). Our findings add to this limited inquiry and go one step further by revealing that the impact of leaders on employee thriving is bounded by wider organizational environment (i.e., the physical context of store spatial crowding).…”

Cognitive job crafting: A possible response to increasing job insecurity and declining professional prestige

“…In line with research using data collected at different times (e.g., Russo, Buonocore, Carmeli, & Guo, ), we conducted a series of t‐ tests on the demographic variables, cognitive job crafting, job insecurity, and PEP to control for attrition sample bias. No significant differences were found with regard to either demographics or the main study's variables between participants in the two waves ( n = 321) and the dropouts (i.e., those who only completed the survey at T1, n = 401).…”

FSSBs and Elderly Care: Exploring the Role of Organizational Context on Employees’ Overall Health and Work–Family Balance Satisfaction

“…Building on one of the core tenets of the W-HR model that resources at work generate further resources in another domain and motivate employees while hindering work demands deplete from one's resources (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017), we extend FSSB research by exploring two key, yet untested, antecedents from a resource perspective (Craine & Stevens, 2018): POS and unsupportive work-family culture. Our focus on POS is important to cultivate and breed an organizational culture supportive of such informal policies, which are less costly for organizations, and yet effective (Bagger & Li 2014;Russo, Buonocore, Carmeli, & Guo, 2015). Our focus on unsupportive work-family culture is important to inform organizations and HR executives of the potentially negative consequences when work environment is hindering (e.g., Las Heras, Rofcanin, Bal, & Stollberger, 2017).…”

“…A focus on FSSBs as a mediating mechanism between organizational culture and subordinate outcomes, and thus bringing a behavioral perspective, is novel in that it echoes research on the role of supervisors in sense giving, signaling, and implementing various informal HR policies that ultimately impact and shape employees' performance (McDermott, Conway, Rousseau, & Flood, 2013;Maitlis, 2005;Matthews, Mills, Trout, & English, 2014;Russo et al, 2015). From a trickle-down model perspective, this is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study that (a) explores both a positive and negative route and that (b) takes organizational culture as a starting point, cascading down the hierarchy to impact on the subordinates' work outcomes.…”

“…By conceptualizing elderly care as a resource that generates energy and positive effects for the caregiver (Ten Brummelhuis & Bakker, 2012), we contribute to recent research which has started to highlight the importance of caregiving needs as boundary conditions and contextual elements in FSSB research (e.g., Bagger & Li, 2014;Russo et al, 2015) as well as to broader work-family literature Kossek et al, 2017). Yet, we depart from recent research (e.g., Kim & Gordon, 2014) in turning the limelight to both supervisors' and subordinates' elderly care responsibilities and argue how experiencing such challenging family conditions might generate positive personal resources and translate into enhanced work experiences for subordinates , Hayes, 2013, Hobfoll, 2002.…”