Resilience & Attachment: How Secure Workplace Attachment Leads to Resilient Teams

Our Attachment at Work study explored workplace attachment styles and their relationships with resilience. In this article, we explore the connection and how we can use it to build stronger resilience at work.

Resilience is the ability to quickly recover, or bounce back, from challenges and setbacks. Higher psychological resilience has been linked to reduced risk of depression and burnout, and even quicker physical wound healing¹, ², ³.

According to the American Psychological Association, resilience involves “mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility”, and is affected significantly by the way we see the world, our social resources, and our coping strategies.

Even though there are neurobiological mechanisms associated with resilience, studies have shown that resilience can be learned and supported⁴, ⁵.

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In the workplace, resilience can help us to cope with stress and manage high physical, mental, or emotional demands. Resilient teams build resilient organizations, which can be all the more important in uncertain economic climates.

Because resilience is so important for individuals and organizations to thrive, we decided to include it in our Attachment at Work study.

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?

We measured resilience using the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), developed by Bruce Smith and colleagues at the University of New Mexico⁶. This scale asks 6 questions about resilience, and has been validated and proven to be reliable and useful in psychological research⁷. Scoring highly on the BRS means stronger resilience.

We compared the BRS scores with our Attachment at Work scores to understand any links between workplace attachment anxiety, workplace attachment avoidance, and resilience.

How Are Resilience and Workplace Attachment Related?

Overall, higher resilience scores were associated with more secure Attachment at Work scores. This makes sense, as secure attachment styles result in a strong sense of self, confidence, and a sense of having a “safe base” to return to when things go wrong. These traits give us an ability to adapt and be flexible when the world presents us with challenges.

Secure attachments also make it easier to foster connections with other people, meaning more availability and higher quality social support, which the APA identified as an important part of being able to be resilient.

The association between workplace attachment anxiety and resilience was 92% stronger than the association between workplace attachment avoidance and resilience.

Resilience and Workplace Attachment Anxiety

When you have an anxious attachment style, you might experience intense emotions and difficulty regulating them, delicate relationships with others, and less confidence navigating the world.

All of these things can contribute to lower resilience scores. Intense emotions make it difficult to implement coping skills, as your brain is not able to think clearly when emotions are running high. What’s more, the “up and down” relationships you might experience with others can impact the social support available to you – you might feel nervous to rely on the people around you, or look for support so frequently that others need to step back.

When you have an anxious attachment style, you have a generally positive view of others – this is one way that anxious attachment styles might be resilient, as it enables you to see the world in a positive light; your less positive view of yourself is where you might fall down.

Resilience and Workplace Attachment Avoidance

On the other hand, if you have an avoidant attachment style, you might have a more positive view of yourself but a less positive view of others. This and your tendency to shut people out and rely on yourself can hinder your resilience, as it limits the social support available to you and skews your view of the world negatively.

Avoidance can also impact your coping skills – while avoiding might feel like coping, studies show that “avoidant defenses are fragile and tend to collapse during intense and prolonged stressful episodes”⁸. In other words, better coping skills are needed to build real resilience.

However, people with avoidance tend to have more stable self-esteem. This can contribute to greater resilience as facing challenges is less likely to shake your sense of self. This is one reason why the relationship between resilience and workplace attachment avoidance might have been less strong.

Another possible reason for this difference could be that avoidance impacts the way we respond to the BRS itself. If we avoid our feelings or thoughts about difficult times, we might be more likely to say that we get over them quickly, or interpret our avoidance of the topic as having moved on from it emotionally.

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Other Factors in Resilience

We also wanted to know whether other factors could be related to resilience. To find out, we compared resilience scores based on workplace setup (remote/hybrid/full-time office based), professional status, gender, and parenthood.

Resilience was not related to workplace setup, even though there were interesting findings related to workplace setup and burnout.

Business owners, contractors, and employed managers showed the highest resilience (with similar scores), followed by employed non-managers, while unemployed respondents showed the lowest. We don’t know the direction of this relationship – it could be that resilience helped these respondents to attain roles with greater autonomy, but it could also be that the autonomy afforded to them by their role contributes to their ability to adapt. The real relationship is likely to be complex and affected by lots of different factors.

Men showed higher resilience than women, and people with children reported higher resilience than those without. These results might be indicative of difficulties women can face in the workplace and the resilience that parents need to develop to focus on their children.

Can Resilience Be Built?

Cultivating a resilient team is vital to the success and adaptability of an organization. The good news is that resilience can be supported, for example, through mindfulness-based programs or boosting social integration⁹.

We found that the people who could benefit the most from building resilience are those with the least job role autonomy, women, and people without children. Although it’s important to support resilience-building, especially for these groups, it’s also important to examine the wider organization and understand whether other team dynamics are creating challenges.

Our study indicates that supporting secure Attachment at Work could also help to boost resilience by improving social support, confidence, and positive mindsets. If you don’t know your or your team’s resilience and workplace attachment scores, you can find out these and more through our workplace attachment test.

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