COLLEGE STATION, July 20, 2010 — When supervisors want better performance from employees, there is a single step they can take: provide them with a more enriching, flexible work environment. That step is seemingly enhanced if the supervisor has a good work-home life balance, researchers find.
Dwayne Whitten
There is a direct link between supervisor work-family enrichment and subordinate performance, says the new research conducted by Dwayne Whitten, clinical assistant professor of information and operations management at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School and colleagues.
It works like this: when a supervisor has a healthy balance between work and life, it creates and promotes a more family-friendly work environment. This in turn leads to improved employee performance.
The paper, “Pay it forward: The positive crossover effects of supervisor work-family enrichment,” which Whitten created with colleagues D.S. Carlson, M. Ferguson, K.M. Kacmar and J. Grzywacz, is forthcoming in Journal of Management. Whitten describes “paying it forward” in this context as a supervisor’s own work-family enrichment compelling him or her to create a more family-friendly work environment for subordinates, essentially a “pay it forward” type of arrangement whereby supervisors attempt to replicate their own experience for their subordinates.
For some corporations, telling managers to spend less time in the office and more time at home seems counterintuitive. As one climbs the ranks of a company, increasing responsibility can mean less time for personal endeavors. But, says Whitten, in this case, time away from the office can actually lead to measurable gain for the whole team.
Whitten and his colleagues surveyed 161 employees and 48 immediate supervisors from a broad range of organizations including manufacturing, professional services, education, and health services. Key in the research is that it did not look at CEOs, but rather middle managers. Immediate supervisors are frequently gatekeepers in setting the standards for acceptable behavior in a work group. If employees see their immediate boss flex his or her schedule to attend a child’s soccer game or a long lunch with a spouse, employees will feel more comfortable in modifying their schedules to be more harmonious with outside-of-work life.
When supervisors have well-balanced work and family lives, they pay it forward to their employees, Whitten says.
In the study, nearly 90 percent of the supervisors were married and 77 percent had at least one child living at home. For subordinates, 71 percent were married and 59 percent had at least one child at home. The survey asked participants to rate statements such as, “My involvement in my work helps me acquire skills and this helps me be a better family member,” and “My involvement in my family puts me in a good mood and this helps me to be a better worker.” Other elements of the survey asked supervisors to rate employee performance, and employees to rate how family-supportive the organization is, what degree of schedule control they have, and a performance self-evaluation.
Researchers found that when subordinates feel they have greater schedule control, it has a positive impact on their job performance as evaluated by their supervisor and themselves. Researchers theorize that supervisors with high levels of work-family enrichment may become more tuned in to the work-family needs of their subordinates and may, therefore, respond by improving workplace family friendliness. The environment may occur through formal or informal policies that allow workers to take control over their work schedule, including location. Likewise, a management style that connotes a sense of family friendliness or concern about worker’ lives outside the office—such as showing concern for subordinate home-life situations, providing help during a personal emergency, or showing sympathy about family issues – can pay big workplace dividends.
When supervisors have a well-balanced work and family life, they pay it forward to their employees. Then, supervisors more readily empathize with subordinates and provide support that leads to enrichment; this enrichment leads to greater engagement in the workplace on the part of the employees, as well as improved performance.
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About research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is in the vanguard in making significant contributions to the storehouse of knowledge, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represents an annual investment of more than $582 million, which ranks third nationally for universities without a medical school, and underwrites approximately 3,500 sponsored projects. That research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world.
Contact: Kelli Levey, News & Information Services, at (979) 845-4645 or Dwayne Whitten at (979) 845-2919.
