Journal of African Development

Work-life balance has become a central organizational concern as digital connectivity, intensified performance expectations, and increasingly permeable role boundaries reshape employees' capacity to coordinate work and nonwork demands. Formal policies create structural opportunities, yet their practical value depends heavily on immediate supervisors who allocate workload, interpret flexibility, model availability norms, and legitimize boundary protection. Drawing on social support theory, conservation of resources theory, work-family border theory, and the family-supportive supervisor behavior framework, the study examines four supervisory dimensions: emotional support, instrumental support, role-modelling behaviour, and creative work-family management. A quantitative explanatory design was adopted with 315 employees from organized-sector workplaces in India. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire supported by personal interviews, following a pilot study with 60 employees. Multiple regression assessed the simultaneous contribution of the four leadership dimensions to employee work-life balance, while one-way analysis of variance examined differences across work-experience groups. The four-dimensional regression model explained 55.3% of variance in employee work-life balance and was statistically significant, F(4, 310) = 95.78, p < .001. Emotional support, instrumental support, role modelling, and creative work-family management displayed positive coefficients, with emotional support and creative work-family management producing the strongest standardized effects. Work-life balance also differed significantly across experience groups, F(3, 311) = 9.53, p < .001. The findings position supervisor behaviour as a portfolio of relational, practical, normative, and work-design resources that can convert formal work-life intentions into sustainable employee experience. The study extends work-family research by comparing the incremental contribution of four theoretically distinct supervisory behaviours within one explanatory model and offers a focused basis for leadership development, boundary-sensitive work design, and employee well-being strategy......