The application of attachment theory in work and organizational settings has gained a lot of relevance in recent years [1,2,3]. Previous studies explored attachment in relation to organizational behaviors, such as job satisfaction, leadership, and trust [1] as well as organizational outcomes, such as job performance [2, 3]. Since job performance is critical to organizational effectiveness, applying attachment theory to explore factors contributing to enhanced job performance improvement might be particularly important. In the literature, job performance is typically linked with employee engagement [4]. Understanding employee engagement through the lens of employee attachment to their organizational leader, therefore, has a potential to explain the link between employee engagement and employee performance and expand on our current knowledge related to employee engagement and performance.
Attachment models
According to attachment theory, a child has an innate need to attach to their primary caregiver [5]. Based on the interactions with their attachment figures, children develop attachment patterns that have been shown to manifest throughout their lives and across different relationships [6,7,8]. Additionally, the attachment patterns with their attachment figures also inform children’s internal working models—mental representations of themselves and other people with whom they form relationships. These internal working models affect behavior, thinking, and perception in all attachment relationships [7], and, contribute to the development of a global attachment model [9]. Global models represent the entire history of significant relationships and serve as default model guide for new relationships or novel situations [9]. Furthermore, the history of specific types of relationships (such as partnerships) are incorporated in domain-specific models, and the history of a relationship with a specific person (such as a current partner) in specific-relationship models [10]. The latter ones provide interpretation filters that affect behavior, cognition, and perception of the attached one in that specific relationship [11,12,13].
Global models are strongly related to overall psychological adjustment [12] and well-being [14], while specific models are related to relationship-specific outcomes, such relationship satisfaction [12, 14]. Since specific-relationship models serve as important interpretation filters of behaviors and perceptions of the other in specific attachment relationships, they seem particularly well-suited for exploration of workplace attachment relationships that significantly differ from other types of social relationships in boundaries, tasks, and goals [11,12,13]. In this study, we apply the specific-relationship attachment lens to explore the attachment between employees and their organizational leaders in order to better understand the link between employee engagement and employee performance.
Organizational leader as an attachment figure
Even though that a feeling of security as the primary goal of attachment remains constant [5], other factors related to attachment, such as triggers of attachment behavior, ways of seeking proximity, even attachment figures themselves, might change [15]. People have multiple attachment figures as they go through life, for example their parents [5], romantic partners [16], and other significant adults [6]. In secure attachment pattern, attached people experience distress when separated from their attachment figures and attachment figures provide secure base (i.e., support, encouragement, responsiveness, and availability) and safe haven (i.e., protection, reassurance, soothing) when attached people seek proximity [5, 6, 17,18,19].
Hazan and Shaver [20] were the first to note that the functions of attachment figures can be observed in the workplace where leaders might serve as attachment figures for their employees. From an attachment perspective, leaders might serve as a secure base for their employees who turn to the leaders for support during stressful workplace situations, such as when a change or a loss occurs [3]. The understanding of leadership and employee behaviors through the attachment lens has recently gained a lot of attention [21,22,23,24]. Molero et al. [24] developed a questionnaire to examine the perception of the leader as a security provider and found that this perception is related to various organizational variables, such as transformational leadership, satisfaction with management, perception of the manager's efficiency, authentic leadership, organizational identification, work engagement, work satisfaction, and job burnout [24]. The perceived leaders’ support was also found to positively predict employees’ proactive behavior in a recent study [23]. Furthermore, the supervisors’ support, recognition, and feedback were found to be salient in developing and maintaining work engagement of newly employed workers [25]. Engagement and willingness to perform above expectations are the most critical employability skills for recent employers [26].
These studies’ findings indicate that employee-leader relationship research can be expanded to and benefit from an attachment perspective. Since organizations should strive to support employee productivity by utilizing empirically confirmed predictors of focal and contextual performance [4], the perception of a leader as an attachment figure might significantly contribute to our knowledge of employee performance, and consequently, enhance work outcomes.
Work engagement, performance and leaders as attachment figures
While the positive connection between the perception of a leader as an attachment figure and work engagement is hypothesized [25], the research in this area is novel and therefore, only a handful of previous studies examined this connection within an organizational environment [23,24,25, 27]. In their seminal work describing the development of the perception of the leader as a security provider scale, Molero et al. [24] found a positive association between the leader security perception and work engagement. Similarly, a different study found that the perceived leaders’ support predicted employees’ proactive behavior [23]. Stable relational models of attachment might, therefore, either facilitate or constrain employees’ engagement [27].
Engaged employees contribute to organizational performance and contextual performance by creating a social context that enhances organizational effectiveness [28]. Engagement is considered to be a significant predictor of employee effectiveness for both focal and contextual work performance [4]. Work performance is usually described as direct and indirect contributions of an individual to an organization's goals [29]. It consists of two interplaying components: task performance and contextual performance. Task performance refers to in-role or formal job performance, and can be described as the expertise with which employees perform basic technical activities relevant to the job. In this study, task performance was operationalized as the general performance. Contextual performance is characterized by activities that contribute to the psycho-social benefit of the organization [30]. These activities may not be registered or paid [29, 31], but are very welcome by employers [26]. Contextual performance is defined similarly to citizenship organizational behavior as “individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization” (p. 86) [30].
Coleman and Borman [32] defined a 3-cluster data-driven model of citizenship performance. According to these authors, citizenship performance has three components (p. 36): (1) Interpersonal Citizenship Performance defined by behaviors that assist, support, and develop organization members through cooperative and facilitative efforts that go beyond expectations; (2) Organizational Citizenship Performance defined by citizenship behaviors that demonstrate commitment to the organization through allegiance and loyalty to the organization and organization objectives, and compliance with organizational rules, policies, and procedures; and (3) Job/Task Conscientiousness defined by extra efforts that go beyond role requirements and that demonstrate dedication to the job, persistence, and the desire to maximize one's own job performance.
Goal of the current study
Several studies consider leaders as important participants in attachment research [15, 21, 22, 24], but there are only a few studies that focused on the perception of the leader as an attachment figure [23, 24]. Despite the pioneering work of Hazan and Shaver [20], leaders are usually not acknowledged as attachment figures. Work engagement as a confirmed predictor of complex organizational performance is expected to be enhanced by a supportive organizational environment and a culture, that can be fostered by a perception of the leader as a security provider [4]. Studies focused on the role of attachment in predicting work outcomes, typically examine attachment in workplace as a mediating or a moderating factor [1, 2]. No previous studies examined the perception of the leader as an attachment figure as a potential mediating variable between employee engagement and organizational outcomes. Moreover, recent studies focus on attachment style as a global or domain model of attachment and lack in considering the specificity of work relationships in between employees and their leaders. Therefore, the current study focused on the perception of the leader as an attachment figure as a mediating variable between work engagement and work performance. We stated the following hypotheses:
H1
The perception of the leader as a security provider has a mediating effect on the relationship between work engagement and general work performance.
H2
The perception of the leader as a security provider has a mediating effect on the relationship between work engagement and citizenship performance.