Witnessing interparental violence and leader role occupancy: the roles of insecure attachment and gender

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-10-2021-0279
• Published date: 07 April 2022
• Date: 07 April 2022
• Pages: 866-888
• Subject Matter: HR & organizational behaviour,Employment law,Diversity,equality,inclusion
• Author: Anika Cloutier,Julian Barling

Witnessing interparental violence

and leader role occupancy:

the roles of insecure attachment

and gender

Anika Cloutier

Rowe School of Business, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, and

Julian Barling

Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

Abstract

Purpose –Given the role leaders play in organizational effectiveness, there is growing interest in

understanding the antecedents of leader emergence. The authors consider parental influence by examining

how witnessing interparental violence during adolescence indirectly affects adult leader role occupancy.

Drawing on the work–home resources (W-HR) model, the authors hypothesize that witnessing interparental

violence serves as a distal, chronic contextual demand that hinders leader role occupancy throughits effects on

constructive personal resources, operationalized as insecure attachment. Based on role congruity theory, the

authors also predict that the relationship between attachment style and leader role occupancy will differ for

women and men.

Design/methodology/approach –To test the hypotheses, the authors used data from the National

Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R) (n51,665 full-time employees).

Findings –After controlling for age, education, childhood socioeconomic status and experienced violence,

results showed that the negative indirect effects of witnessing interparental violence on leader role occupancy

through avoidantattachment was significant for females only, while the negative effects of anxious attachment

hindered leader role occupancy across sexes.

Originality/value –Results identify novel distal (interparental violence) and proximal (attachment style)

barriers to leader role occupancy, showing empirical support for the life-span approach to leadership and the

persistent effects of home demands on work.

Keywords Leader emergence, Work–family spillover, Domestic violence, Attachment style, Gender

Paper type Research paper

Introduction

Who becomes a leader, and who does not, is of considerable importance to employees and

organizations. First, attaining leadership roles is personally beneficial to individuals as these

roles offer greater income, social status and organizational resources (Li et al., 2018;Marmot,

2004). Second, who occupies leadership roles is important to organizations, as leaders

influence employees’health and success (Schyns and Schilling, 2013) and organizational

effectiveness (Quigley and Hambrick, 2015;Arvate and Story, 2021). Our goal in this research

is to explore distal and proximal factors that differentiate between those who become leaders

and those who do not. Consistent with the interdependence between work and family

literature (Allen and Martin, 2017) and the lifespan approach to leader emergence (Liu et al.,

2021), we examine whether adolescents’observations of interparental violence indirectly

relates to adult leader role occupancy through insecure attachment.

We focus on the role of witnessinginterparental violence on leader roleoccupancy for two

reasons. First, decades of research show that home and family experiences affect work

EDI

41,6

866

The authors acknowledge financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

of Canada for the conduct of this research.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/2040-7149.htm

Received 28 October 2021

Revised 27 January 2022

3 March 2022

8 March 2022

Accepted 17 March 2022

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 41 No. 6, 2022

pp. 866-888

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-10-2021-0279

outcomes (Barling, 1990;Greenhaus and Beutell, 198 5),including leadership-relatedoutcomes

(Murphy and Johnson, 2011). One family experience that has received less attention in the

work–familyliterature is domesticviolence. Domesticviolence includes psychological, physical

and sexuallyviolent behaviorsdirected towards intimaterelational partners (Gellesand Straus,

1988). Interparental violenceis a common form of domesticviolence, that is often recognizedor

observed by children, and estimates suggestthat as many as 25% of children in high income

countries (Gilbert et al.,2009;Wathen and MacMillan, 2013) and at least 27% of children in

lower income countries (Devries et al.,2017) witness interparental violence. Although the

damaging effects of witnessing violence on well-being are well-established (Wathen and

MacMillan, 2013), the long-term consequences of such observations on children’s later work

outcomes remain unknown (Liu et al.,2021;MacGregor et al., 2021).

Second, witnessing interparental violence may be particularly relevant to leadership

emergence. Although we know that parental behaviors shape children’s social and

interpersonal skills (Kitzmann et al.,2003), workplace attitudes (Barling et al., 1998) and even

leader emergence (Liu et al., 2019;Reitan and Stenberg, 2019), parents also influence their

children’s attitudes and behavior vicariously (Bandura, 1977). Parents who model violent

behaviorsaffect the psychosocialdevelopment of their children(Kitzmann et al., 2003), which in

turn could affect their children’s later leader role occupancy. Following Liu et al.’s (2021)

commentson the role of parents on leadershipdevelopment acrossthe lifespan, we hypothesize

that witnessing parental violence will shape children’s relational schemas (i.e. attachment),

which will in turn affectthe likelihood they assume leadership positions later in life.

We position our conceptual model within Liu et al.’s (2021) lifespan approach to leadership

development, and ten Brummelhuis and Bakker’s (2012) work–home resources (W-HR)

model. We hypothesize that witnessing interparental violence serves as a significant, distal,

contextual demand on adolescents that is indirectly and negatively associated with leader

role occupancy, through the mediating effects of constructive personal resources (i.e. anxious

and avoidant attachment). Based on role congruity theory (Eagly and Diekman, 2005;Eagly

and Karau, 2002), we further hypothesize that the negative effects of insecure attachment on

leader role occupancy will differ by gender, such that anxious attachment will be more

detrimental for men’s leader role occupancy, while avoidant attachment will be more negative

for women. Finally, we control for several variables in our analyses (i.e. age, education,

childhood socioeconomic status and child-directed violence) that could alternatively explain

the hypothesized relationships.

Leader role occupancy and the role of early familial experiences

Interest in the antecedents of leader role occupancy has existed for more than seven decades

(e.g. Stogdill, 1948), with most investigations focusing on the role of stable individual

differences, such as intelligence (Daly et al., 2015), personality traits (e.g. Ensari et al., 2011)

and genetics (e.g. De Neve et al., 2013). It is now becoming clear that leader emergence is also

influenced by early social environments (Liu et al., 2019), and early family experiences may

particularly affect who emerges as a leader and who does not. As established in past research

(Arvey et al., 2007;Badura et al., 2021;Barling and Weatherhead, 2016;Li et al., 2018), we

conceptualize leader role occupancy as holding an organizational role that has formal

supervisory responsibility for the behavior and performance of others.

To date, some studies have investigated the relationship between parental influences and

leadership.For example, transformationalparenting (Zacharatos et al.,2000), parental support

(Oliver et al.,2011) and authoritative parenting(Kudo et al., 2012) have allbeen associated with

children’s positive leadership behaviors. In contrast, neglectful and authoritarian parenting

behaviors lower children’s later leader effectiveness (Lamborn et al., 1991). With regards to

leader emergence, a positive family environment, including parental support during

Interparental

violence and

leadership

roles

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