ATTACHMENT THEORY AND BULLYING IN BUSINESS

1. BPS conference - “Working Together to Tackle Workplace Bullying: Concepts, Research and Solutions” 14 - 15 Sept 2005 Portsmouth Business School ATTACHMENT THEORY AND BULLYING IN BUSINESS Ginny Lynch Thames Valley University London Reading Slough

2. 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 1

3. 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? 2

4. 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 3

5. 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 4

6. Secure/insecure attachment • Insecure attachment: quality of care lacksintimacy, 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 5

7. 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 6

8. Anxious insecure attachment and avoidant insecure attachment Ainsworth took insecure attachment one step further and proposed 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) 7

9. 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 8

10. 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 9

11. Being bullied If the above seemed possible, could I also map the adult attachment 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 10

12. THE QUESTIONNAIRE INSTRUMENT I prepared hypotheses based on these notions & drew up a self report instrument, comprising: • Negative Acts Questionnaire (Einarsen & Raknes, 1997) to measurebeing 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. 11

13. 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 12

14. Previous literature: Popper These 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. 13

15. Back to that constellation: • Secure attachment emerged as a significant predictor of being bullied - again, confounding my original notions (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 But I put these findings down to the problems of self-reporting and also to the concept that secure individuals may be more likely to say that they have been bullied and been a bully (with nothing to lose and nothing to hide?) 14

16. This supplements Ronald Heifetz (1994) 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). (& finally - anxious attachment didn’t emerge as either a predictor of being bullied or being a bully) 15

17. TO SUM UP Cautiously optimistic that attachment theory is a useful framework for further research on bullying – showing the predictive fertility of Bowlbian principles. 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 16