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ervisor with the organization. Supervisors who appear to be highly valued and well treated by the organization would be highly identified with the organization's basic character and would therefore strongly influence. Of course, an employee may attribute a supervisor's high perceived status to the organization's misperception of the supervisor's character. But, on average, supervisors who appear to be highly regarded by the organization would be assumed by workers to strongly embody the organization's character (Levinson, 1965).

Some researcher has found that parents of preschoolers reported lower levels of work-family conflict if they perceived their supervisors were willing to discuss family-related problems and were flexible when family emergencies arose. In some of the early studies dealing with supervisor supportiveness, researchers focused on whether a supervisor supported the use of a specific practice. More recently, researchers have focused on the overall supportiveness of a supervisor rather than his/her support for the use of a given family-oriented benefit.

Allen (2001) defined a family supportive supervisor as one who is sympathetic to the employee's desires to seek balance between work and family and who engages in efforts to help the employee accommodate his or her work and family responsibilities.

Given the theoretical rationale provided by Allen (2001) and his findings, a negative relationship has been predicted between reporting to a supportive supervisor and work-family conflict. With regard to the relationship between reporting to a supportive supervisor and family-work conflict, to our knowledge, no study has examined this relationship. However, to the extent that a supervisor is perceived as supportive of balancing work and family demands, it seems likely that there should be less reported family-work conflict.

Supervisors may have an important bearing on the individual outcomes which subordinates get from their job. In many respects, the supervisor is the most direct and important person in an employee's work context and is therefore most expected to stand for the organization's culture or climate as well as having a direct influence on subordinate behavior (Kozlowski & Doherty, 1989).

Considerable importance in research has been placed on individual performance and group productivity, with some notice also being given to satisfaction with the supervisor. Fewer researches have been conducted on the impact of supervisors on other emotional reactions which employees might experience, such as psychological stress and wish to leave the organization. Two assumptions underlying the present study are (a) that one important realm of influence which supervisors might control is the degree of uncertainty which personnel have to contend with in their work environment, and (b) that uncertainty is a predictor of work-related affect, strain and behavioral intentions. An argument has been made, through their interactions with subordinates; supervisors may lessen or, on the other hand, exacerbate the amount of uncertainty confronted by workers within an organization. Supervisors' behavior may be quite significant for alleviating or increasing the uncertainty and irregularity which subordinates experience about their job tasks, about management, and about the social and political dynamics of the organization (O'Driscoll & Beehr,1994).