This study is the first to examine family-supportive behaviors that supervisors need to demonstrate that will lead to employee perceptions of managerial supportiveness for work and family. It is also the first to explicitly link conflicts between work and family demands to worker safety and the mental and physical health of workers and their families.
Michigan State University
We believe that this connection between how supervisors organize work (that is family-supportive supervisory behaviors), and communicate and administer work and family policies and work schedules will enhance U.S. public health and occupational health policy. Work characteristics such as the supervision, hours, characteristics, culture, location, and flexible scheduling of work can constrain an employee's ability to care for children, parents, and self and can bring the stresses of work into personal and family health.
The design of work and public health and employer policies have not been fully updated in the U.S. to accommodate the transformation of the work and family relationship. Although workplace studies are starting to demonstrate that supervisory support for work and family may be more important (or at least as important) as formal workplace policies and supports, the specific behaviors that supervisors should do in order to effectively help employees manage work and family conflicts have not been clearly nor specifically identified.
Within this study, focus groups will be conducted to identify a list of family-supportive supervisor behaviors that help in reducing employees stress in the workplace. We will then conduct a pilot study to assess a training-intervention using a combination of face-to-face and computer-based training methods to evaluate effectiveness. This study will inform public health by determining if training specific supportive behaviors are effective at improving the health, safety, work, and family well-being of workers AND if so, determine which training intervention methods are most effective.
This is the first study to explicitly link conflicts between work-family conflict and worker safety outcomes, in addition to worker health and family-related outcomes. We believe that this connection between the organization of work (i.e., supervisory behaviors that are supportive of work and family), work-family conflict, and safety outcomes, will make a significant contribution to the development of models, learning procedures and measures of supervisor effectiveness that integrate the work-family interface and occupational health.