Advancing Supervisor Support for Flexibility through Training

In this seminar, Ellen Ernst Kossek of Stanford University and Purdue University will share results from a field experiment on training supervisors around work-life balance.

Many employers assume that supervisor support training is unlikely to benefit employees in jobs susceptible to burnout with limited work–life flexibility. Further, even when employees have access to jobs with work-life flexibility, they don’t necessarily leverage their flexibility to engage more in family roles. These issues are exacerbated when supervisors are unsure of their roles in supporting work-life flexibility. Prof. Kossek identifies work–life supportive context as a key factor that provides solutions to these dilemmas, based on results from her year-long randomized employer field experiment involved the design, implementation, and evaluation of a supervisor training intervention to target support for employees' personal life roles and control over their work-life boundaries. In examining her field experiment results, Prof. Kossek argues employers need to consider how job characteristics influence the differential benefits of work-life interventions.

Ellen Ernst Kossek is the 2025-2026 VMWare Women’s Leadership Lab CASBS Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is currently a Distinguished Family Scholar at the Center for Families and Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor Emerita at Purdue University. She was the first elected president of the Work Family Researchers Network. Her research examines how supervisor training and flexibility and remote work policies influence control over the work boundary to support or detract from job quality, work-life equality, productivity, and well-being.

This virtual seminar is part of WAPPP’s weekly fall series Exploring Work and Family, led by WAPPP co-director Hannah Riley Bowles. Attendance is open to all.