One size fits all? Contextualizing family-supportive supervision to help employees with eldercare responsibilities

Eldercare can pose significant challenges for both employees and organizations wherein supervisors serve as critical linchpins. To better inform practitioners on how to assist employees with eldercare responsibilities, we investigated important work outcomes of eldercare-supportive supervision (ESS), a specific form of family-supportive supervision. Drawing on the job demands-resources model and social information processing theory, we framed ESS as a critical informational cue and an important job resource in employees' immediate work environment that shapes employee work attitudes and behaviors. For this important segment of the workforce, we hypothesized that ESS could relate to employees' job performance and time banditry through work engagement, and that caregiver burden would moderate these relationships such that the beneficial effects of ESS would be stronger for employees with high caregiver burden. Using a vignette-based experimental (between-person) design, Study 1 (N = 70) found that employees reported significantly higher work engagement in the high (vs. low) ESS condition. Study 2 supported the indirect effects of ESS on employee job performance and time banditry via work engagement in a field sample (N = 162) of nurses with eldercare responsibilities. In Study 3 (N = 257), using a 3-wave time-lagged design, we replicated our findings and further demonstrated the incremental validity of ESS above and beyond other relevant supports. Finally, we demonstrated that the effect of ESS on work engagement and the indirect effects of ESS on job performance and time banditry were stronger for employees with high (vs. low) caregiver burden. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.