Family‐supportive supervisor behaviors: A review and recommendations for research and practice

Summary Family‐supportive supervisors empathize with employees' attempts to balance work and nonwork, while also actively facilitating employees' ability to manage work and nonwork demands. Over the last three decades, approximately 60 publications have investigated family‐supportive supervisor behavior (FSSB), with one third of these appearing in just the last 3 years. Thus, as the burgeoning FSSB literature continues to develop, there is a critical need to understand this body of work in totality in order to further advance theory, expand empirical investigation of the construct, and facilitate the practical dissemination of FSSB‐related information into organizational settings. We conduct the first comprehensive and systematic review of the FSSB literature to date. More specifically, we discuss early formative work establishing the construct of FSSB, existing theory, antecedents, outcomes, moderators, and interventions. Lastly, we provide a number of future directions for this subject area related to construct clarification, theory, expanding the FSSB nomological network, methodology, and interventions.