Family Supportive Supervisor Behaviors (FSSB) is a 14-item measure of the extent to which the respondent's work supervisor empathizes with employees' desire to seek balance between work and family responsibilities. This instrument contains 4 sub-scales: Emotional Support, Instrumental Support, Role Model, and Creative Work-Family Management.
Geographies Tested: United States of America
Populations Included: Female, Male
Age Range: Adults
Emotional support
1. My supervisor is willing to listen to my problems in juggling work and nonwork life.
2. My supervisor takes the time to learn about my personal needs.
3. My supervisor makes me feel comfortable talking to him or her about my conflicts between work and nonwork.
4. My supervisor and I can talk effectively to solve conflicts between work and nonwork issues.
Instrumental support
5. I can depend on my supervisor to help me with scheduling conflicts if I need it.
6. I can rely on my supervisor to make sure my work responsibilities are handled when I have unanticipated nonwork demands.
7. My supervisor works effectively with workers to creatively solve conflicts between work and nonwork.
Role model
8. My supervisor is a good role model for work and nonwork balance.
9. My supervisor demonstrates effective behaviors in how to juggle work and nonwork balance.
10. My supervisor demonstrates how a person can jointly be successful on and off the job.
Creative work-family management
11. My supervisor thinks about how the work in my department can be organized to jointly benefit employees and the company.
12. My supervisor asks for suggestions to make it easier for employees to balance work and nonwork demands.
13. My supervisor is creative in reallocating job duties to help my department work better as a team.
14. My supervisor is able to manage the department as a whole team to enable everyone's needs to be met.
Response Options:
5-point Likert scale
Strongly disagree - 1
Strongly agree - 5
Higher scores on each sub-scale represent more supportive behaviors among supervisors.
Hammer, L. B., Kossek, E. E., Yragui, N. L., Bodner, T. E., & Hanson, G. C. (2009). Development and validation of a multidimensional measure of Family Supportive Supervisor Behaviors (FSSB). Journal of Management, 35(4), 837-856. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206308328510
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