How Daily FSSB and Ethical Leadership Affect Work Stress for Chinese Public Servants

— Employees’ work stress has been studied extensively. This study investigates how day-to-day family supportive supervisor behaviors (FSSB hereafter) affect daily subordinates’ work stress. 137 employees responded to daily surveys for 10 days. With a total of 1370 surveys, the results showed that daily FSSB was positively related to daily subordinates’ positive emotions, and ethical leadership positively moderated the relationship between the two. In addition, daily FSSB and daily subordinates’ positive emotions had negative effect on daily work stress, which provided evidence that daily subordinates’ positive emotions played a mediating role in the relation of daily FSSB and daily work stress.


INTRODUCTION
As work stress is more and more becoming a key factor influencing employees' psychological and physical state (Nielsen et al., 2008). How to relieve employees' work stress has attracted significant attention in organizational research. In workplace, co-workers and supervisors play an important role in deviating subordinates' stress (Sloan, 2012;Edwards, 1999). Actually, Supervisors' support plays a more important role in relieving subordinates' work-related stress (e.g., Yang et al., 2015). In particular, supervisors' family supports increasingly make a massive contribution under the current circumstance that the majority of employees act family roles as well as work role simultaneously (Thomas & Ganster, 1995). Behson (2005) proposed that compared to other variable of organizational family-related support, FSSB contributed to more variance in employee stress.
The Affective Events Theory (AET hereafter) holds that events happening in organizational environment could stimulate organizational members' emotion, which in turn lead to a serious of emotion-driven behaviors, attitudes and cognitive judgments ( Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996;Lee et al., 2017). A mass of empirical evidence supported the mediating role of emotions in the relationships between work-related events and employee's outcomes (e.g. Tremmel, Sonnentag, & Casper, 2018). In the same vein, we inferred that, FSSB that acts as a positive event provide a supportive and enjoying environment, Lee et al. (2017) claimed that an enjoying environment is beneficial to employees' positive emotions, which in turn, relieve employees' perception of stress.
Moreover, the leader trait making an underlying effect on the influence of FSSB on subordinates' outcomes is deserved to be concerned. Ethical leadership has been proved to be a key variable in affecting employees' outcomes by a considerable amount of research (e.g., Piccolo et al. 2010). In specially, some scholars investigated the moderating effect of ethical leadership at work (e.g. Lu  However, the major of ethical leadership research has been conducted in Western countries, more researches on ethical leadership are called for in Chinese culture that labeled collectivism, team orientation, and harmonious relationships (e.g. Walumbwa et al., 2011). This study aims to consider ethical leadership as a situational condition and investigate the moderating role in Chinese culture.
To sum up, in line with AET, FSSB functions as a positive events for facilitating subordinates' positive emotions and in turn relieve work stress. In addition, if the leader is an ethical leadership, the leaders' supportive behavior will more strongly generate subordinates' positive emotions. Therefore, this study was aimed to evaluate a model specifying the role of FFSB in relieving subordinates' work stress by the method of ESM, which could respond to Kossek et al.'s (2011, p. 304) assertion that "none of the studies in our database considered how perceptions of workplace support cascade across levels of analysis". In addition, some scholars claimed that AET also emphasize the necessary of exploring within-person experiences (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996). This study addresses the within-individual relationship of FSSB and subordinates' work stress as mediated by positive emotions, as well as the cross-level moderating role of ethical leadership.

FSSB
As early as the 1950s, researchers have suggested that employees in perceptions of being supported tend to form a various of positive work outcomes. Among a variety of supports, FSSB could provide a serious of supportive actions enabling employees to satisfying work and family demands simultaneously (Kossek et al., 2011). Based on AET, emotions stem from specific events (Lazarus & Cohen-Charash, 2001), positive events generate employees' positive emotions, and negative events lead to negative emotions. It is no doubt that FSSB considered as a positive events will benefit to employees' positive emotional states. Majdar, Oldham and Pratt (2002) provide an empirical support that leader support was related to subordinates' positive emotions.

Ethical leadership
Leaders are important in influencing and changing subordinates' beliefs, attitudes, and core values. Ethical leader is such leader who act ethically in personal actions and promote the conduct to his employees through "twoway communication, reinforcement, and decisionmaking" (Brown et al., 2005, p. 120). Ethical leaders have a serious trait such as honest, fairness, trustworthy and concerned about their followers, which provide a supportive, trust and pleasant context for employees to generate positive emotions such as happiness (Mayer et al., 2012).

Subordinates' positive emotions
The significance of positive emotions in workplace has been proved in both empirical studies and reviews, for example, positive emotions is helpful to establish social support networks, set challenging goals (Fredrickson 2004;Ilies & Judge, 2005). There are also research supporting the adaptive functions of positive emotion during stress (Fredrickson & Losada, 2005). A mass of empirical studies provide evidence that positive emotion contribute greatly to individuals' resilience and adaptation to stress (e.g., Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000). The broaden-and-build theory also provide a theoretical perspective on how positive emotions relieve individuals' work stress through expanding one's scope of attention and cognition (Fredrickson, 2001).

Research Goal
This study was intended to investigate how daily FSSB influence subordinates' positive emotions and work stress, furthermore, how ethical leadership take a moderating role. The hypotheses are proposed as following: H1: within-individual, daily FSSB is positively related to daily subordinates' positive emotions.
H2: Ethical leadership has a moderating effect on the relations between daily FSSB and daily subordinates' positive emotions.
H3: within-individual, daily FSSB is negatively related to daily work stress.
H4: within-individual, daily subordinates' positive emotions is negatively related to daily work stress.
The theoretical model is showed in Figure 1.

Sample and Data Collection
The sample consisted of 137 full-time public servants in China (68 females and 69 males). 161 potential participants registered their interest originally. Considering variant work schedules, participants were allowed to complete this survey at the end of the working day, anytime between 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. each day. The participants were asked to complete one survey each day for 10 working days. Finally, 137 participants completed the study (85% response rates). The questionnaire was designed with Likert-type scale. The scale of FSSB, ELS, and work stress ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), the scale of positive emotion ranged from 1(rarely) to 5 (very often). Data were analyzed by SPSS. Table 1 shows means, standard deviations and correlations of the variables. The alpha reliability for all the scales range from 0.89 to 0.94, which indicated satisfactory reliability.  The intra -and inter -individual variation of work stress was examined. The results showed that the intraindividual variation of work stress was 0.52, accounting for 56% of the total variance, and the inter-individual variation was 0.41. The inter -individual variation of subordinates' positive emotion was 0.27, accounting for 54% of the total variation, which indicating that the dayto-day variation contribute most variance of outcome variables.

DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS
Results of the regression analyses are presented in Table 2, Table 3, Table 4 and Table 5.  According to the results, FSSB affected subordinates' positive emotions positively, ethical leadership positively moderated the relationship between FSSB and subordinates' positive emotions. It was also found out that FSSB and subordinates' positive emotions had a significantly negative effect on work stress. In addition, the findings indicated that subordinates' positive emotions mediated the relation between FSSB and work stress, ethical leadership moderated the mediating mechanism, which partially implied that leaders' family supportive behavior generated subordinates' positive emotions which in turn reduced work stress, especially, the effect was stronger when the leader was an ethical leader.

DISCUSSION
This study aimed to investigate the effects of work related family-support on subordinates' work stress which was mostly universal in organizations. Specifically, we concentrated on the effects of subordinates' emotions in this study. AET proposed that workplace events can generate individuals' emotions, and then influence subordinates' judgments, behaviors and attitudes toward the work itself (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996). This study found that FSSB positively influenced subordinates' positive emotions. This implies that the support of managers as a positive event can reduce work stress while generating positive emotions for subordinates. In addition, moral leadership will have a stronger impact on relationship.
To our best know, there exists no similar study. However, there were not without limitations in this study. First, we don't conclude negative emotions. Although the majority of research has concluded that negative emotions lead to negative individuals' consequences, there are still some scholars arguing that negative emotions may also lead to positive outcomes (e.g. Grandey, 2008;George & Zhou, 2002). Second, the data were selected from a single-source, which may incur the threats of common source bias. Despite these limitations, the result in this study provide important theoretical and practical implications for developing stress management programs.