The Impact Of Family Supportive Supervisor Behavior On Employees' Proactive Behavior

Family supportive supervisor behavior(FSSB)refers to the behavior that supervisors encourage and support employees to actively fulfill their roles and responsibilities in the family,it aims to help employees better balance work and family responsibilities.As an informal form of family support,there are not many research results about it,but it has been highly valued by work-family scholars since it was proposed,and has now become a work-family field.Most of the existing researches have explored the importance in promoting employees' work-family balance in the Western context,but its effect in promoting employees' proactive behavior in the workplaces is very limited.In the face of an increasingly complex business environment in recent years,employee initiative is seen as one of the key determinants of an organization's competitive advantage and success.Under the Chinese cultural context of cultivating the ethics,whether the special supervisor support resources of FSSB will have an impact on the proactive behavior of employees in workplaces is worthy of attention.And figuring out the affect mechanism will be more conducive to the implement of FSSB in the organization.The study is based on the Social Exchange Theory and Organizational Agents Theory.We use questionnaire methods(240 employees from enterprises as research subjects)and experimental(176 full-time graduate students were randomly assigned to one of the scenario versions),attempting to probe the mechanism of the impact of the family supportive supervisor behavior on employee's proactive behavior,specially to explore the mediating role of the affective commitment and the moderating role of the power distance.The data analysis results show that:(1)FSSB has a significantly positive effect on employee's proactive behavior;(2)Affective commitment plays a mediating role between FSSB and employee's proactive behavio;(3)Supervisor's organizational embodiment moderates the relationship between FSSB and affective commitment,and further moderates the indirect relationship between family supported supervisory behavior and employee's proactive behavior through affective commitment.That is,the higher the supervisor's organizational embodiment is,the stronger the mediating effect of affective commitment becomes.This study based on the inconsistency of the goal-source subject of social exchange,from the perspective of the “supervisor-organization-employee” to confirm the impact of family-supported supervisor behavior on employee workplace active behavior,emphasizing the positive effects of FSSB as a special support resource on employees' work attitudes and behaviors,it also provides some practical implications for managers and organizations.