Early dysfunctional parental influence in leadership development: An adult attachment perspective

Abstract

Drawing from the attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969), we propose to develop and test a theoretical model that explains how and why leaders’ early experience of dysfunctional parenting (e.g., abuse or neglect) may affect their subsequent leadership behaviors in organizations. Leaders’ insecure adult attachment styles are hypothesized to play a key intervening role in this developmental process. Specifically, leaders who experienced parental abuse in their early years of life tend to develop an avoidant attachment style in adulthood, and as a result, tend to engage in abusive supervision against their subordinates. In contrast, leaders who experienced parental neglect in their childhood tend to develop an anxious attachment style in adulthood and exhibit lassiez-faire leadership behaviors. In addition, we propose that higher-level supervisory behavior, as a key environmental factor in organizations, plays a moderating role in activating and expressing the effects of insecure attachment styles on leadership behaviors. In specific, exposure to higher-level abusive supervision may increase the likelihood that an avoidantly attached leader engages in abusive supervision against subordinates. In contrast, exposure to higher-level lassiez-faire leadership may increase the likelihood that an anxiously attached leader engages in lassiez-faire leadership. The hypothesized model will be examined using a multi-level, multi-wave, and multi-source research design. We recruited 214 leaders and 436 followers from multiple business organizations to fill out a survey that includes measures of perceived parental abuse and neglect in early life, attachment anxiety and avoidance, direct supervisors’ abusive supervision and lassiez-faire leadership, as well as several other related concepts for potential control and validation purposes. The subordinate survey was distributed and collected three weeks after the leader survey, both onsite. Our hypotheses have been largely confirmed with results from Structural Equation Modeling analyses.