2026 KANTER LECTURE

How Supervisor Training Transforms Employee Exhaustion and Family Engagement

Ellen Ernst Kossek, Ph.D.

The Kanter Lecture Series is free and open to the public

This year’s Kanter Lecture welcomes 2025 Kanter Award Finalist, and CFF Distinguished Family Scholar, Ellen Ernst Kossek, PhD, as she highlights how training supervisors to be more supportive can help employees feel less burned out and more engaged both at work and at home. Drawing on Job Demands Resources Theory, this study maintains that when organizations provide work–life supportive training to supervisors, they promote a supportive context that reduces emotional exhaustion for employees with limited work–life flexibility, and boosts family engagement for those with greater flexibility.

Join us to learn how small changes in leadership and workplace culture can make a big difference in well-being, performance, and family engagement.

2025 Kanter Award finalist article: Kossek, E. E., Porter, C. M., Rosokha, L. M., Wilson, K. S., Rupp, D. E., & Law‐Penrose, J. (2024). Advancing work–life supportive contexts for the “haves” and “have nots”: Integrating supervisor training with work–life flexibility to impact exhaustion or engagement. Human Resource Management, 63(3), 397–411. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.22207

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Ellen Ernst Kossek, Distinguished Family Scholar at CFF; Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor Emerita of Management at Purdue University; and is currently VMWare Women’s  Leadership Lab CASBS Fellow at the Center for Advance Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Ellen is an award-winning U.S. social scientist who does pioneering work to advance the U.S. and international work-family research policy fields and work-life equality.

She holds a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Yale University, an MBA from the University of Michigan, and a Bachelor’s degree with honors in psychology from Mount Holyoke College. For the past 4 years, she has been ranked in the top two percent of scientists in business for global research impact by Stanford/ Elseviers’ ranking.

Ellen was the first elected President of the Work-Family Researchers Network. She is elected a Fellow in the Academy of Management and the American Psychological Association and the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. She served as an expert on the U.S. National Academies of Sciences Committee on Family Policies to support Caregivers working in STEM. She was elected to the Board of Governors and Chair of the Gender and Diversity in Organizations Division of the Academy of Management.

Other faculty appointments include University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University visiting scholar at the University of Bologna; Distinguished Faculty Scholar, Kings College U.K., Distinguished Visiting Fellow and Faculty Scholar: Queen Mary University of London and UNISA in Australia. She also served for over a decade on IESE’s work-family and women’s leadership advisory board in Barcelona, Spain.

Ellen has worked for major corporations in the U.S., Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. She has been invited to speak in many countries about work-life-family issues, including flexible working, remote and hybrid work, and employment policies/practices to remove barriers to advancing women in higher education and business. Her research has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control, the National Science Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan, Russell Sage, and Gerber Foundations. She is a published author of several books including Creating Gender-Inclusive Organizations: Lessons from Research and Practice and CEO of Me: Creating a Life that Works in the Flexible Job Age, which has been translated into several languages. She is married with four children and a dog named Max.

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SPONSORED BY

The Center for Families
The Center for Working Well
Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management | Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business