香蕉秀

An employee today typically juggles a myriad of duties on the job and at home. For example, many employees are the primary caregivers of young children as well as elders. Fulfilling these roles efficiently can be extremely demanding and conflicting, diminishing job satisfaction and promoting absenteeism. Any organization wanting to retain superior employees would strive to prevent such precarious outcomes. According to聽, a management and organizational psychologist, supervisors act as effective mediators as well as 鈥減rimary implementers of work and family policies.鈥澛�聽care about employees鈥� career goals, give credit for work well done, and help employees develop job-relevant skills and competencies. Given the salience of work/family issues in the labor force,听.

Effective supervisor support is associated with increased job satisfaction and job commitment, perceptions of a better fit between the employee and the organization, reduced work/family conflict, and lower turnover (,听,听). 聽A significant link exists between employees鈥� perceptions of the level of support they receive from their supervisors and their perceptions of the level of support they receive from the organization as a whole (,听,听,听). Supervisors are the agents of an organization鈥攔esponsible for monitoring the performance of subordinates, undertaking periodic assessment of their work, and giving feedback to enhance the value of their work and to reinforce their commitment to their jobs. Therefore, it is natural for employees to interpret their interactions with their supervisors as indicators of an organization鈥檚 view of them. Moreover, employees understand that supervisors report their evaluations of subordinates to upper management, further contributing to employees鈥� association of supervisor supportiveness with perceptions of organizational supportiveness.

Contrasting perceptions in developed and developing countries
At Boston College鈥檚 Sloan Center on Aging & Work, we were interested in the cross-national dimensions of perceptions of supervisor supportiveness. To explore these, we used the lens of supervisor supportiveness to review findings from the聽.

More than 80 percent of employees in our seven-country sample (Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, China, and India) reported having a supportive supervisor. Employees in two of the four developed countries in our sample (Japan and the Netherlands) rated the supportiveness of their supervisors at the lowest end of our scale. In contrast, employees in the other two developed countries (the United Kingdom and the United States) rated the supportiveness of their supervisors at the top of the scale. This reflects a broad divergence of employee perceptions of supervisor supportiveness among these four industrial nations. Notably,听employees in China signaled the highest confidence in the degree of support they receive from their supervisors鈥攕ignificantly higher than employees in most of the countries in our sample indicated. Whereas perceptions of the degree of supervisor supportiveness varied significantly across the developed countries in our sample, perceptions in developing countries were generally highly positive.

• Surprisingly,听female employees with more supportive supervisors reported a lower level of satisfaction with their work/family balance聽than did female employees with less supportive supervisors.
• In addition,听perceptions of supervisor supportiveness seem to weaken along the career ladder, with early-career employees tending to be the most positive and late-career employees tending to be the least positive.

It would be interesting to study whether these career-stage differences pertain to the maturity and attitudes of employees as they age or if they are indicative of the characteristics and evolution of supervisory relationships over time.