AI Insight
This study examined how family-supportive supervisor behavior relates to employee stewardship behavior through psychological mechanisms. Using data from 506 Chinese employees and their supervisors across three time points, researchers found that supervisors who support work-family balance promote employee stewardship primarily through enhancing individual thriving, with work-family enrichment playing a secondary but important role in this process. The relationship operates through a serial pathway where family-supportive supervision first enables work-family enrichment, which then fosters individual thriving, ultimately leading to greater stewardship behavior.
Why it matters
These findings suggest that organizations seeking to cultivate long-term employee commitment and responsible organizational citizenship should prioritize supervisor training in family-supportive practices. The research demonstrates that supporting work-life balance is not merely a retention tool but a strategic investment that builds psychological resources and promotes employees' stewardship of organizational interests.
Understand the Science
IntroductionUnder rapid digitalization and increasingly blurred work-family boundaries, organizations face the challenge of protecting employees’ psychological resources while fostering stewardship toward long-term organizational interests. Although family-supportive supervisor behavior provides an important contextual resource for employees, the resource-based process through which such family-supportive supervision translates into Employee Stewardship Behavior remains insufficiently explained.MethodsDrawing on Conservation of Resources Theory, this study develops a serial mediation model to examine how Family-Supportive Supervisor Behavior is associated with Employee Stewardship Behavior through Work-Family Enrichment and Individual Thriving. Matched data were collected from 506 employees and their immediate supervisors in China using a three-wave, multi-source survey design.ResultsThe results show that Family-Supportive Supervisor Behavior is positively associated with Employee Stewardship Behavior. Moreover, Individual Thriving independently mediates this relationship, whereas Work-Family Enrichment contributes to Employee Stewardship Behavior primarily through its serial pathway via Individual Thriving. The downstream pathways linking Work-Family Enrichment and Individual Thriving to Employee Stewardship Behavior appear relatively stable across employee subgroups.ConclusionThis study advances organizational psychology research by clarifying how supervisory practices that support work-life balance are related to cross-domain enrichment, psychological resources and future-oriented organizational responsibility.