Attachment-Informed Leadership (AIL): A New Leadership Framework based on Attachment Theory and Social Neuroscience
Abstract
Leadership research has catalogued many styles, among them transformational, authentic and servant leadership, but has offered few accounts of the regulatory mechanisms through which leader-follower relationships operate. We propose that attachment, understood through social neuroscience, supplies one such mechanism. Humans regulate environmental demands relationally, and attachment organises this social regulation of a finite bioenergetic budget under challenge. When followers face threat, dependence or uncertainty, this relationship can come to serve attachment functions, and the leader's reliability as a security provider bears on how much of followers' regulatory resources remains available for work. Building on the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment (SoNeAt), we develop an attachment-informed leadership (AIL) framework spanning social allostasis, attachment and caregiving, predictive regulation and biobehavioural synchrony. We position AIL relative to evolutionary accounts of leadership and derive nine propositions that distinguish attachment processes from exchange, trust and identification, measurable from self-report to physiology and brain activity.
Related
- Attachment and Caregiving as Social Allostatic Inference: An Updated Social Neuroscience Account from Single Brains to Dyads
- Beyond Anxiety and Avoidance: A Dynamic Feedback-Regulation Framework for Adult Romantic Attachment
- Beyond Anxiety and Avoidance: A Dynamic Feedback-Regulation Framework for Adult Romantic Attachment
- Perceptions of Climate Change Risk and Place Attachment: Parallel Indirect Associations Through In-Visit Evaluations of Memorable Tourism Experience and the Perceived Future Benefits of Edible Insects
- Enzymatic attachment of antigens to probe immune modulation by skin commensals
BibTeX
@misc{vrticka2026attachmentinformed,
title = {{Attachment-Informed Leadership (AIL): A New Leadership Framework based on Attachment Theory and Social Neuroscience}},
author = {Pascal Vrticka and Jonathan Wolf-Phillips},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/ys4g3_v7},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ys4g3_v7/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Attachment-Informed Leadership (AIL): A New Leadership Framework based on Attachment Theory and Social Neuroscience
AU - Pascal Vrticka
AU - Jonathan Wolf-Phillips
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/20
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/ys4g3_v7
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ys4g3_v7/
AB - Leadership research has catalogued many styles, among them transformational, authentic and servant leadership, but has offered few accounts of the regulatory mechanisms through which leader-follower relationships operate. We propose that attachment, understood through social neuroscience, supplies one such mechanism. Humans regulate environmental demands relationally, and attachment organises this social regulation of a finite bioenergetic budget under challenge. When followers face threat, dependence or uncertainty, this relationship can come to serve attachment functions, and the leader's reliability as a security provider bears on how much of followers' regulatory resources remains available for work. Building on the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment (SoNeAt), we develop an attachment-informed leadership (AIL) framework spanning social allostasis, attachment and caregiving, predictive regulation and biobehavioural synchrony. We position AIL relative to evolutionary accounts of leadership and derive nine propositions that distinguish attachment processes from exchange, trust and identification, measurable from self-report to physiology and brain activity.
ER -