Family Supportive Supervision Around the Globe

Family-supportive supervision (FSS) refers to the degree to which employees perceive their immediate supervisors as exhibiting attitudes and behaviors that are supportive of their family role demands (Hammer, Kossek, Zimmerman, & Daniels, 2007; Kossek, Pichler, Bodner & Hammer, 2011: Thomas & Ganster, 1995). A growing body of research suggests that leaders\u27 and supervisors\u27 social support of employees\u27 needs to jointly carry out work and family demands is important for general health and job attitudes, such as satisfaction, work-family conflict, commitment, and intention to turn over (Hammer, Kossek, Anger, Bodner, & Zimmerman, 2009; Kossek et al., 2011). Thus, employee perceptions of FSS are critical to individual well-being and productivity (Hammer, Kossek, Yragui, Bodner, & Hansen, 2009). [excerpt

Crafting Lives That Work: A Six-Year Retrospective on Reduced-Load Work in the Careers and Lives of Professionals and Managers

Presents findings from interviews conducted from November 2002 to November 2003 to learn how professionals who had chosen to work less, for family and other reasons, would continue to make choices over time to achieve their desired lifestyle

Desperately Seeking Sustainable Careers: Redesigning Professional Jobs for the Collaborative Crafting of Reduced-Load Work

Reduced-load (RL) work, a flexible customized form of part-time work in which a full-time job is redesigned to reduce the hours and the workload while taking a pay cut, can enable sustainable careers. Yet previous research suggests mixed results, with RL work facing implementation hurdles such as insufficient workload reduction, and stalled careers often adversely affecting women and caregivers. This study, therefore, focuses on the implementation of sustainable RL work and sheds light on key issues under-examined in prior studies: 1) the job redesign tactics that supervising managers implement to reduce workloads, and 2) shared responsibilities at the job and organizational levels. Drawing on the literature on sustainable careers, work redesign, and job crafting, we analyze 86 qualitative interviews with managers who experimented with RL work, HR experts, and executives in 20 organizations that were early adopters of RL work. We identify differentiating and integrating work redesign tactics that either reduced or reshuffled workloads. Next, we propose a three-stage process of collaborative crafting of RL work, in which employees, managers, and employers share responsibilities to strengthen the work redesign tactics and manage cultural expectations to support RL implementation. We provide implications for future research and practice

From Ideal Workers to Ideal Work for All: A 50-Year Review Integrating Careers and Work-Family Research with A Future Research Agenda

Historically, the careers literature, (grounded in vocational psychology) and the work-family literature, rooted in industrial-organizational psychology and organizational behavior (IO/OB), were not well-integrated, developed at separate speeds, and differed in gender focus. Early career studies targeted men\u27s careers, while work-family studies centered on women\u27s careers. Both literatures assumed conformity to an Ideal Worker norm. Looking over fifty years, the goal of our paper is to conduct a review in order to identify commonalities and gaps, and suggest integrative lenses for future research. The 71 studies we identified that addressed both work-family and careers issues clustered into three main approaches: careers studies emphasizing vocational psychology lenses, work-family studies from IO/OB research, and dual-realm focused research that was usually from other disciplines. Surprisingly, two-thirds of the articles were conceptual, suggesting that integration is currently more aspirational than it is reality. Most empirical articles took a trade-off lens, assuming an incompatibility between high dual role investments in career and family, which helps perpetuate ideal worker models. This gendered siloing of work-family and careers issues and the need for studies to address critical integrative problems was observed over fifty years ago in Rosabeth Moss Kanter\u27s seminal (1977) monograph, an agenda that our review suggests is still largely unrealized today. To guide the next decades\u27 future research, we build on Kanter\u27s prescient agenda, and propose expansion to four integrative lenses: Whole Life Demands-Resources; Linked-Lives of Family Life Course and Career Stages; Diversity, Intities; and Ideal Work in Changing Social, Technological, and Economic Contexts. Our agenda will help advance understanding of the pressing problems that affect the integration of employees\u27 careers and work-family concerns, and the conditions that support the design and implementation of ideal work for all