Mental health expert Noel McDermott looks at how HR professionals can use attachment theory to foster a secure workplace environment for employees.
As a manager, you may have been faced with odd behaviours within your teams, leaving you with the belief that there’s nothing so strange as folk. Individuals in your team may have been baffled by their own tendency to undermine themselves when faced with authority or find themselves relating to a colleague in ways that distress you. Attachment theory could have the answers.
What is attachment theory?
Attachment theory is a core concept in relationships and therapy, applicable to all human bonds. It is a core concept to understand how we develop as social animals. It underpins the neurological understanding of how our personalities form from birth onwards. Most people will know the three attachment patterns of: secure, insecure and avoidant. These are to a small extent inherited, but also hugely affected by the social environment in which we grow up and our current social environment.
What is known less and is useful to know in the work context is that attachments form in three developmental stages:
- Primary attachment – to the first care relationships of feeding, changing etc.
- Secondary attachments to the carer who supports the primary relationship.
- Tertiary attachments to the siblings if they are there in the family, but also to school relationships and in this case, crucial work relationships.
“Attachment processes are biological due to us being social animals, but are experienced psychologically. So attachment processes happen whether we want them to or not and a smart manager is open to them and how they can help form a healthy efficient work team or destroy one.”
The 3 golden rules of attachment processes
Rule 1: Secure attachment creates high-functioning employees
The more securely a person is attached, the higher functioning they are, and the more effective they are intellectually, cognitively, relationally and so on. Secure attachment has global impacts on the individual, producing a more pro-social and effective person and a healthier person who takes less time off for illness. Every aspect of an individual’s functioning improves when they are in a secure attachment.
Rule 2: Work is a protective factor
Attachment processes open up at school and at work specifically. Work is a protective factor in health and wellbeing terms. Worklessness and unemployment is a stress factor, producing ill health in most people. Given we are primed for attachment at work, we can use that fact to maximise our workforce by encouraging secure attachment processes.
Rule 3: Insecure attachment can be repaired at work
Even if a person has insecure or avoidant attachment patterns, they can be repaired by being in a healthy work environment, without recourse to complex psychological therapy. Just simply being in a healthy secure attachment environment will produce new personality growth, moving the person into healthier self and other relationships.
Key aims for applying attachment theory in the workplace
HR professionals can create secure attachment in the workplace by offering warmth and emotional support within acceptable boundaries, predictability, clear leadership on goals and a positive work culture promoting diversity.
