Family-supportive supervision (“FSS”) is viewed by scholars as a best practice in organizations and has been linked to several important individual and organizational outcomes. However, this past research has been fraught with issues that have challenged the utility of these findings. As such, Daniel, Sargent, and Shanock (2023) introduced a new conceptual framework of FSS that suggests supervisors’ enactment of specific helping and hindering behaviors are the critical component of FSS, and they further assert that these behavioral patterns are more important to employees’ evaluations of FSS than any one behavior in isolation. Building on this work, the current investigation explored whether distinct profiles of family-relevant supervisor behavior are experienced by employees, and if so, how these profiles might differentially predict FSS evaluations. Taking a person-centered approach, we used latent profile analysis with data collected in two waves from 257 U.S. workers representing various occupations and industries. Our findings reveal four distinct profiles of supervisor family-relevant behavior patterns (bolstering, obliging, erratic, and impairing) that indeed predict different levels of FSS evaluations. We discuss implications for theory and practice.
