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

Abstract

Fierce competition coupled with an increasing presence of dual-earning couples and blurred boundaries between work and family, increasingly render work–family lives of employees important. In this context, one strategy to enable employees achieve greater work–family interface is via Family Supportive Supervisor Behaviors (FSSBs), defined as supervisors’ informal discretion to implement family-friendly policies at work. Inspired by the growth in research on FSSBs, the over-arching goal of this study is to explore (a) the triggers of FSSBs from an organizational context perspective and (b) the role of FSSBs as a mechanism to translate the impact of organizational context on subordinates’ overall health and work–family balance satisfaction. Furthermore, we expand our model by integrating the (c) role of supervisors’ and subordinates’ elderly care responsibilities as an individual boundary condition to explain how the FSSBs unfold and for whom they are most effective. Using the Work–Home Resources model (i.e., W-HR model; Ten Brummelhuis & Bakker, 2012), we test our hypotheses with matched data of subordinates and their supervisors collected in El Salvador and Peru. Our model was largely supported. Findings point to the importance of organizational and supervisor support as well as the importance of involvement with elder-care responsibilities in driving FSSBs and enhancing employee perceptions of health and their work–family balance satisfaction.