The Mechanism And Intervention Of Family Supportive Supervisor On Employees’ Work Attitudes And Work Engagement

Nowadays, the diversified demands including work, family and personal life from enterprise employees continues to grow. If these demands can’t be satisfied, the negative impact on employees (aggravating constantly work-family conflict, imbalance to work-family relations, decreasing the quality of life) and organization (employees’ negative work attitudes, reducing work engagement and work performance) will occur. Therefore, it is necessary and urgent to find ways to meet the diversified demands of employees. Making a general survey of work-family interface studies, we find that theoretical studies were extremely rich, while the intervention studies was few. How do work-family interface studies ultimately affect organizations? How to let employees benefit? these problems are the key to break through the bottleneck in this field. Recent studies have found that family-supported supervisor was considered to be one of the most effective ways to meet the diversified demands of employees. As a kind of extra-role positive behavior, family-supported supervisor is seen as an executor of work-family culture, a promoter of family-friendly policy and an agent of organization’s family-friendly support. Conservation of resources theory emphasizes the flow of resources, synergetic effect and cycle effect of the different resources, which helps us more in-depth understanding of the mechanism and boundary condition of family-supported supervisor on work attitudes and work engagement. Therefore, based on conservation of resources theory as a guiding framework, the study discusses the effect of family-supported supervisor on work attitudes and work engagement, and conducts an intervention study which includes the experiential training and behavior monitoring of WeChat to increase family-supported supervisor behavior. The main contents and conclusions of this research are as follows:(1) Study 1 mainly discusses the structure and characteristics of family supportive supervisor. The first part of the study used interviews which include 20 pairs of supervisors and employees. The results showed that family supportive supervisor composed of emotional support, instrumental support, role modeling behaviors, and creative work-family management. Using questionnaire survey, the second part of the study implemented confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for date of 509 employees. The present research showed that family supportive supervisor questionnaire had good reliability and validity, and can serve as a tool for future research. The results also showed that there was significant difference in role modeling behaviors between the male employees and female employees. The employees who had a child under 18 years old perceived lower family supportive supervisor than the employees who had no child under 18 years old.(2) Study 2 mainly discusses the effect and mechanism of family supportive supervisor on employees’work attitudes and work engagement. The third part of the study used questionnaire survey which includes 358 employees. The study discussed the effect of family supportive supervisor on employees’work attitudes. The results showed that there was a process of gain resource among family-supported supervisor behavior, work-family enrichment and job satisfaction. Perceived individual boundary control moderated the process of gain resource. The positive relation between family-supported supervisor behavior and job satisfaction mediated by work-family enrichment was stronger for employees in having higher perceived individual boundary control than lower boundary control. The fourth part of the study used questionnaire survey which includes 340 workers from supermarkets in China. Those who participated in this survey twice with a time lag of six months, showed that family-supported supervisor behavior related positively to leader-member exchange and vice verse. Similarly, there was a positive reciprocal relationship between leader-member exchange and work engagement. There was a gain spiral of resources in family-supported supervisor behavior and employee’work engagement.(3) Study 3 discusses an intervention study which includes the experiential training and behavior monitoring of WeChat to increase family-supported supervisor behavior. The fifth part of the study aimed to increase employee’work attitudes and behaviors, conducting a quasi-experimental field study to assess the impact of an experiential training and self-monitoring intervention which was designed to increase supervisors’use of family supportive supervisor behaviors. Pre-and post-intervention surveys were completed in six months apart which contained totally 131 employees (intervention group:N= 62, control group:N= 69).24 supervisors in the intervention sites received the training consisting of three hours of experiential training and one month (a total of two stages, each stage for two weeks) of behavioral self-monitoring. Results demonstrated the positive effect of training on employee work attitudes (turnover intention, affective commitment) and work engagement. Work-family conflict moderated the relationship of training and employee work engagement. In particular, in comparison to low work-family conflict, positive training effects were observed for employees with high work-family conflict. The impact of the interactive effect of training and work-family conflict on work engagement were mediated by employees’perceptions of family-supportive supervisor behaviors.