Being a Family Supportive Team Leader: Implications for Team Emotional Climate and Performance

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.