Supervisor Actions for Supporting Employees Through Stressful Work Situations: A Critical Events Approach From the Perspective of Supervisors

Abstract

In this research, we aim to further our understanding of supervisors' enactment of psychosocial risk management and their own psychological responses to supporting employees through stressful work situations. Informed by event system theorizing and the special case of affective events, we examined 342 employee critical events of a stressful nature through the eyes of the supervisor. Thematic analysis revealed 16 supervisor actions that were aggregated into nine supervisor action themes that supervisors evaluated for stressfulness and effectiveness. Clustering stressfulness and effectiveness scores revealed the emergence of three supervisor groups: favorable, unfavorable, and challenge. Multinomial logistic regressions demonstrated that both organizational and supervisor psychosocial risk management capabilities reduced the odds of supervisors developing unfavorable psychological responses in relation to their supervisor action, whereas supervisors with time pressure and psychological distress had increased odds. In addition, supervisors experiencing psychological distress had a twofold likelihood of experiencing their chosen action as both stressful and effective, calling into question the potential for future benefits to arise from what might be otherwise considered a challenge experience. Overall, our findings demonstrate that pre-existing features of the supervisor's own psychosocial work environment shape their psychological responses to having enacted psychosocial risk management, irrespective of the type of supervisor action.