Anxious And Avoidant Attachment At Work: How Does it Affect You?

What is the anxious and avoidant attachment at work? How does it affect the workplace and team dynamics? 

Although organizations place little emphasis on it, anxious and avoidant attachment can pose serious challenges for the employees, leading to low esteem and dissatisfaction.

The Impact of Secure Attachment

Secure attachment is a personality trait characteristic of those who can work autonomously and with others when appropriate. In my study of 161 employees of an assisted living center and their supervisors, my colleagues and I found that secure attachment was positively related to hope and trust and negatively related to burnout. 

In our study, the ability to form a trusting relationship with one’s supervisor was the only significant predictor of job performance.

Why do Anxious and Avoidant Attachments take Place?

Anxious and avoidant attachment styles result from early interactions with caregivers or childhood experiences. These attachment styles are, in fact, the result of several variables, including the quality of care they receive, caregiver responsiveness, and temperament. 

Let’s take a look at the reasons behind these attachment styles.

Anxious Attachment

One of the reasons that people experience anxious attachment is because they’ve received inconsistent responses from their caregivers in childhood. A parent might be very loving and nurturing at one time and then suddenly become neglectful or unresponsive.

Due to inconsistent care, the child becomes anxious about whether they will get support in their time of need. This anxiety also causes clinginess, as the child feels they will get love and attention from the caregiver only when they hang on to them.

Over Protection

Sometimes, we have overly protective or helicopter parents that make the child over-dependent on them. This also causes anxiety, clinginess, and the need for constant reassurance.

Low Esteem

Children develop low esteem when they grow up in an environment where their needs are not consistently met. They doubt their self-esteem and self-worth and feel they need to work harder and harder to gain the approval and appreciation of others. 

This translates into anxious attachment behaviors in adults.

Avoidant Attachment

Avoided attachment too has its roots in childhood typically, when caregivers neglect a child, or they have emotionally unavailable parents.

As a result, they suppress their needs and emotions, as looking for support or comfort is often greeted with rejection. From then on, they become self-reliant and do not depend on or seek help from anyone.

Emotional neglect 

Often, children’s caregivers view emotional expressions as a display of weakness, which also causes avoidant attachment. As grown-ups, these children become good at hiding their true feelings, maintaining a distance from others, and stopping relying on them for help.

Self Sufficiency

Children often also develop a sense of independence due to unresponsive caregivers. The independence they seek is a coping mechanism that helps them avoid intimacy or reliance on others.

Anxious Vs. Avoidant Attachment

In contrast to securely attached individuals, anxiously attached people are overdependent, and avoidantly attached people are counterdependent on others. Overdependent people cling too tightly to others and, as a result, tend to drain their critical social support networks, while counterdependent people, believing that no one will be available to turn to, isolate themselves and resist supportive gestures from others.

A study recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology sheds some light on the effects of anxious and avoidant attachment styles in the workplace. The researchers summarize their findings as follows:

Taken together, our results are generally consistent with attachment theory in that avoidant individuals tend to be self-reliant and disengage from affiliation with others by suppressing negative emotions and not seeking support to deal with work difficulties, whereas anxious individuals tend to display dysfunctional interaction patterns by being less likely to display prosocial behavior and more likely to think about quitting their job. (p. 11).

One interesting finding from this research was that attachment anxiety was positively related to seeking support at work. This implies that overdependent individuals might be more likely to seek support for stressful situations at work than in romantic or family contexts.

Your Role As a Supervisor

If you are a supervisor, it’s important to understand that people react to stress at work differently, and not everyone will view your attempts to provide support as beneficial. Your employees with a secure attachment style will accept your support, but they are less likely to need it because they probably have a very well-developed and healthy support network, both at work and outside of work. Your employees with an anxious attachment style need your support more than others and will likely welcome it. Your employees with an avoidant attachment style will likely let you know they think they are just fine and neither need nor want your help.

Understanding is the key to working with personality at work. Understand your own personality first, and then try to discern the individual differences of your colleagues and employees. Remember, you cannot change anyone’s personality, including your own. But if you understand personality, you can change the thing you have the most control of at work – your own behavior.

Conclusion

It is difficult to understand the complexity of anxious and avoidant attachment styles, as these require empathy and awareness. By better recognizing these behaviors and their impact, supervisors and employees can work on building a healthy environment and improving the workplace culture.

Anxious and avoidant attachment styles are deeply rooted in early childhood experiences. These styles develop as short-term coping mechanisms for children and are carried on into adulthood. 

This causes challenges in building healthy relations with employees, employers, and others around us. The better we understand these and recognize the attachment styles, the more we can work to work healthier boundaries and interactions. 

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Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Management at The University of Nevada, Reno. He earned his doctorate in Business Administration at Oklahoma State University. Bret blogs about leadership and social business at his website Positive Organizational Behavior. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.