Being a family supportive team leader: Implications for team emotional climate and performance

Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology

The impact of family-supportive supervision at the team level has largely not been explored.

Since teams are the cornerstone of organizational effectiveness, it is critical to understand how family-supportive managers can lead teams to achieve higher performance. We develop and test a team-level moderated mediation model that unpacks the team-level impact of Family Supportive Supervisor Behaviours (FSSB) on team performance.

Drawing on Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, we hypothesize that a team's other-focused emotional climate mediates the positive effects of team FSSB on team performance and that managers' relational job characteristics attenuate the positive influence of team FSSB.

Results from a two-wave, multi-source study of 435 employees and their managers across 56 electronic retail stores support our predictions. These findings advance current multi-level theorizing on FSSB by shedding new light on how and when family-supportive managers can drive team performance.

The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

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The Authors: Marcello Russo, Francesco Montani,Gabriele Morandin, Department of Management - Università di Bologna