Does Your Workplace Attachment Style Affect Your Happiness at Work?

Our Attachment at Work series explores workplace attachment styles and experiences at work. This article dives deeper into whether your Attachment at Work relates to your job satisfaction and altruism (OCB) towards your company and colleagues.

Satisfaction and commitment at work are two of the most significant predictors for employee retention¹. When we are happy at work, we are also more likely to go above and beyond the scope of our roles to contribute to the company’s success².

This act of going above and beyond your role, without being asked to or expecting an immediate reward, is called organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). An example might be swapping your day off to accommodate a colleague, or volunteering to host a social gathering at the office.

As part of our Attachment at Work series, we wanted to know whether your workplace attachment style related to your job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior – particularly whether supporting secure workplace attachment styles could be linked to better job satisfaction and higher OCB, helping us to understand how to better support people and companies to thrive.

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About Our Attachment at Work Study

Our Attachment at Work study aimed to find out how your workplace attachment style – how anxious or avoidant your attachment is to your colleagues – relates to your experiences at work and in your inner life.

From our trialling process, we were able to identify a set of questions that successfully measure attachment at work as a new idea, separate to the attachment we experience with our romantic partners, family, or friends!

64,240 people took part in our study across several different surveys, answering different sets of questions to make up our complete set of data.

For a detailed overview of the Attachment at Work study, check out our article: What is Attachment at Work?

The job satisfaction scale that we used was created by Paul Spector in 1985, and included 9 subdomains³:

• Pay
• Promotion
• Supervision
• Fringe Benefits
• Contingent Rewards
• Operating Conditions
• Coworkers
• Nature of Work
• Communication

We investigated how each of these subdomains related to workplace attachment anxiety and workplace attachment avoidance, giving us rich information about the complex connection between Attachment at Work and job satisfaction.

To get a better understanding of how this might show up in our behavior at work, we also compared workplace attachment scores with OCB using a 2009 measure by Fox & Spector⁴. This measures OCB in two subdomains:

• Acts directed toward the organization that benefit the organization (OCBO)
• Acts directed toward coworkers that help with work-related issues (OCBP)

Job Satisfaction, Organizational Citizenship Behavior, and Attachment at Work

Overall, more secure workplace attachment patterns were associated with higher job satisfaction – but not organizational citizenship behavior.

In terms of job satisfaction, these results make intuitive sense – if we feel more securely attached to our colleagues, we likely experience better social relationships at work, more support, and a sense of belonging and confidence in what we do that benefits all aspects of our experience in the workplace.

However, it might be surprising that the relationship between OCB and workplace attachment patterns isn’t as simple. We might have expected that, since more secure workplace attachment patterns are related to higher job satisfaction, they should also be associated with a higher likelihood of going above and beyond to support your colleagues and the wider organization. But this wasn’t the outcome we saw – so what did we find instead?

Job Satisfaction, OCB, and Workplace Attachment Anxiety

OCB and Workplace Attachment Anxiety

Although people scoring higher in OCB did have lower workplace attachment avoidance, they actually had higher workplace attachment anxiety.

Higher levels of workplace attachment anxiety were associated with both higher OCBO and higher OCBP. This could be because attachment anxiety does tend to drive us to go above and beyond for others, sometimes dipping into people-pleasing and crossing our own boundaries.

We do this because we value other people and our role in their lives very highly, and rejection from others can feel like a threat to our safety – while this can be a positive thing in the workplace, it can also be a problem if not under control. If we overextend ourselves, are taken for granted, or place too much importance on acceptance from others, our self-esteem and mood can suffer.

Job Satisfaction and Workplace Attachment Anxiety

Workplace attachment anxiety was particularly strongly related to lower satisfaction with organizational communication. People with higher levels of attachment anxiety typically want more communication from their attachment figures, as maintaining constant connection helps them to feel secure. Our results might reflect the same pattern – people with workplace attachment anxiety might need more communication from other people in their organization to feel secure.

The relationships between workplace attachment anxiety and other subdomains of job satisfaction were not as strong, although all of them showed lower satisfaction in each domain as workplace attachment anxiety increased. Notably, workplace attachment anxiety was 4.5x more strongly related to lower satisfaction with workload compared with workplace attachment avoidance, although these correlations were small.

OCB and Workplace Attachment Avoidance

Conversely to workplace attachment anxiety, people who scored higher on workplace attachment avoidance scored lower on OCB. This one isn’t surprising, as people with attachment avoidance typically prefer to solve problems alone and maintain some distance between themselves and others. Because people with attachment avoidance typically see others as untrustworthy, they might be hesitant to offer support if they don’t believe their goodwill will be returned.

The correlation between workplace attachment avoidance and OCBP was almost 3x stronger than the correlation between workplace attachment avoidance and OCBO, suggesting that people with higher workplace attachment avoidance are less likely to support their colleagues than the company as a whole. This also makes sense, as forming attachments with other people might feel more vulnerable than acting in ways that further the company.

Job Satisfaction and Workplace Attachment Avoidance

Workplace attachment avoidance was most strongly related to lower satisfaction in coworker relations, job enjoyment, organizational communication, and promotion and recognition. It could be that, because people with avoidant workplace attachment patterns tend to prefer to work alone and maintain separation between personal and professional life, they might be less likely to receive recognition for their work than peers who form closer relationships with colleagues and decision-makers.

Low satisfaction with coworker relations could indicate that people with workplace attachment avoidance do want closer relationships with their peers, but find them difficult to maintain. This is the pattern we typically see in relationship attachment avoidance – people with higher levels of attachment avoidance do want closeness and relationships, but they can pull back because they feel vulnerable or triggered when relationships start to feel too close. Alternatively, our results might indicate a desire to be less close to colleagues than they already are.

Other Factors in Job Satisfaction and OCB

To explore whether personal or situational factors could also be related to job satisfaction and OCB, we looked at their possible connections to workplace setup (whether remote, hybrid, or full-time office-based), professional status, gender, and parenthood.

Job Satisfaction, OCB, and Remote Work

Hybrid workers were slightly more satisfied with coworker relations and job enjoyment than remote workers, and more satisfied than office workers when it came to organizational communication, pay and benefits, promotion and recognition, and overall. Remote workers were the most satisfied with their workload.

Hybrid workers had statistically higher OCBO (directed towards the company), and remote workers had lower OCBP (directed towards colleagues). This makes sense, as remote workers might have fewer opportunities to engage in OCBP since they don’t work with their colleagues in person.

Job Satisfaction, OCB, and Professional Status

Professional status was categorized as: contractor, business owner, employed manager, employed non-manager, or unemployed. Employed non-managers showed the lowest OCB overall, especially compared with business owners and employed managers.

Contractors had the lowest satisfaction with pay and benefits, while managers had the lowest satisfaction with workload. Business owners showed the highest job satisfaction across most aspects and overall, especially when it came to job enjoyment, organizational communication, pay and benefits, and promotion and recognition.

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Job Satisfaction, OCB, and Personal Circumstances

Women reported slightly higher OCBP than men, while men reported slightly higher satisfaction with meaning and purpose. Parents reported higher OCBO and total OCB than people without children, and higher job satisfaction on almost all aspects. People without children were more satisfied with their workload, and there was no difference in scores for people with and without children on promotion and recognition.

Attachment at Work: Hidden Superpowers

Job satisfaction and OCB are intrinsically linked to one another, and improving one could improve the other. Secure Attachments at Work could influence greater job satisfaction, but our finding that greater OCB is related to stronger workplace attachment anxiety highlights the complex relationships at play and demonstrates the different superpowers that different attachment styles can bring to the workplace.

If you’re interested in improving your or your team’s Attachment at Work, take our Attachment at Work test for a detailed overview of your personal workplace attachment patterns or your team’s dynamics, including burnout risk, resilience, and workplace attachment styles.

References

1. Tett RP, Meyer JP. Job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intention, and turnover: path analyses based on meta‐analytic findings. Personnel psychology. 1993 Jun;46(2):259-93.
2. Sumathi S, Gokula Krishnan A. The power of satisfaction: How job satisfaction drives organizational citizenship behaviors. InAIP Conference Proceedings 2025 Jun 5 (Vol. 3306, No. 1, p. 030061). AIP Publishing LLC.
3. Spector PE. Measurement of human service staff satisfaction: Development of the Job Satisfaction Survey. American journal of community psychology. 1985 Dec 1;13(6):693.
4. Fox S, Spector PE. Organizational Citizenship Behavior Checklist (OCB-C). Accessed https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maris-Martinsons/post/How_can_I_get_Organizational_Citizenship_Behavior_scale_measure/attachment/5c2c81a1cfe4a764550d6274/AS%3A710553823633415%401546420641536/download/OCB-C+development+instrument.docx 2025 Nov 14.