ATTACHMENT THEORY AND BULLYING IN BUSINESS

Ginny Lynch

BPS conference - “Working Together to Tackle Workplace Bullying: Concepts, Research and Solutions”

14 - 15 Sept 2005

Portsmouth Business School

Thames Valley UniversityLondon Reading Slough

What did I explore?

Three things:

• A business population

• The experiences of being bullied and being a bully

• Parallels and similarities between romantic attachment theory and bullying experiences in business

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My entry point

Ludic love (Lee, 1973):

• A game-playing love style associated with one night stands and extra-marital affairs

• And with which avoidant attachment has been correlated

- Avoidant attachment? What’s that?

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Mary Ainsworth (1913-1999) & John Bowlby (1904-1990)

• Ainsworth and colleagues working in parallel with the concepts of secure and insecure infant attachment first suggested by Bowlby

• A “warm, intimate and continuous relationship” to which child and caregiver are pre-programmed in order that behaviour is organised and contained in a holding environment

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Infant attachment theory• Ensuring infant adaptiveness and survival

• And facilitating exploration, autonomy and competent relationships

• Accomplished by achievement of the attachment goals of a safe base, felt security and proximity maintenance...

• Resulting in either secure or insecure attachment to the caregiver

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Secure/insecure attachment

• Insecure attachment: quality of care lacks intimacy, consistency and availability

• Insecurely attached infants typically not confident that they will be lovingly responded to

• Secure attachment: quality of care is intimate, consistent and available

• Securely attached infants typically confident that they will be lovingly responded to

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Bowlby suggested:

That, as a result of their infant experience, individuals

build up a model of:• Emotional experience, and

• Cognitive perceptions (about how they view themselves and how others view them)

Such models persist into later life

- so that individuals have either secure or insecure perceptions

of themselves and secure or insecure relations with others

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Anxious insecure attachment and avoidant insecure attachment

Ainsworth took insecure attachment one step further andproposed 2 dimensions of the concept:

• Anxious insecure - the child, fearing abandonment, both clings and is hostile (of which the adult romantic correlate is possessiveness / jealousy)

• Avoidant insecure - the child, avoiding intimacy, becomes emotionally disengaged and indifferent (adult romantic correlates include one-night stands & extra- marital affairs)

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What has this to do with bullying?

• I started to speculate around the theories/research of adult romantic attachments (Feeney & Noller, 1990; Hazan & Shaver, 1987)

• Especially the notion of continuity in quality of relationships from childhood experience into the adult romantic world

Could this continuity be used to understand

relationships in the workplace? …

– specifically being a bully and being bullied

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Being a bully

3 suggestions sprang to mind and it seemed possible that:

• Avoidantly attached - might be emotionally disengaged and indifferent in relations with colleagues

• Anxiously attached - fearing rejection (abandonment /

redundancy), might be aggressive in their dealings; banging the desk, finger pointing, shouting

• Securely attached - typically confident and contained, might have no need to be either avoidant or aggressive

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Being bulliedIf the above seemed possible, could I also map the adultattachment dimensions onto being bullied?

So that:

• Avoidantly attached - might avoid conflict and remove themselves from the bullying threat

• Anxiously attached - might be vigilant to attack and bully back

• Securely attached - might be contained and unafraid and negotiate a resolution of conflict

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THE QUESTIONNAIRE INSTRUMENTI prepared hypotheses based on these notions & drew up a self reportinstrument, comprising:

• Negative Acts Questionnaire (Einarsen & Raknes, 1997) to measure being bullied

• A reversal of the Negative Acts Questionnaire to measure being a bully

• The Experiences of Close Relationships Scale (Brennan, Clarke & Shaver, 1998) to measure attachment status

Given to 150 people in a FTSE 100 company. 97 people responded. Analysis was done using multiple regression.

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A constellation of findings emerged

• A significant minority indicated that they had been a bully - exciting stuff

• Those who had indicated being a bully also indicated that they had been bullied - a correlation consistent with the domestic violence literature (Bartholomew, Henderson, Dutton, 2001)

• Avoidant attachment did not emerge as a significant predictor of being a bully - confounding my original notions

• But it DID emerge as a significant predictor of being bullied - which has interesting implications for those working with the bullied

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Previous literature: PopperThese findings provide a supplemental view to Micha

Popper (2002), whose work with the Israeli army is 1 of

only 2 other bodies of research using attachment theory to

explain workplace/leadership behaviour.

Popper’s work suggested that avoidant

attachment is associated with the affectively

detached exploitation of others, not that such

others would be avoidantly attached.

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Back to that constellation:• Secure attachment emerged as a significant predictor of

being bullied - again, confounding my original notions

But I put these findings down to the problems of self-reportingand also to the concept that secure individuals may be more likely to say that they have been bullied and been a bully (withnothing to lose and nothing to hide?)

(I was expecting securely attached individuals to withstand and negotiate the bullying threat)

• Secure attachment also emerged as a marginally significant predictor of being a bully - again, confounding my original notions

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Heifetz’s work explained how US Presidents have caused or

contained conflict & threat either:• by abusing their position; squandering the opportunity to

provide the right political holding environment (thus failing to ensure that threat is negotiated & contained), OR

• fulfilling their obligation to provide the right political environment (thus ensuring that distress is regulated and threat contained).

This supplements Ronald Heifetz (1994)

(& finally - anxious attachment didn’t emerge as either apredictor of being bullied or being a bully)

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TO SUM UP

ULTIMATELY I HAVE 2 AIMS:

• Intersect further findings with psychological contract theory (are there dimensions of psychological contracting that predict bullying experience?)

• Use academic work to add credibility to the business case for eradicating bullying from our work places

. . .& work with bullies to confront & change their behaviour

Cautiously optimistic that attachment theory is a useful

framework for further research on bullying – showing thepredictive fertility of Bowlbian principles.

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