Attachment-Informed Leadership (AIL): A New Leadership Framework based on Attachment Theory and Social Neuroscience
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
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.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Authors: Pascal Vrticka, Jonathan Wolf-Phillips
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7219566988