Since we met years ago through our daughters, Carin-Isabel Knoop and I have been discussing people’s attachment relationship with work. Carin, from the perspective of Executive Director at Harvard Business School, and I from the perspective of business operator, executive coach and amateur political economist.
With Valentine’s Day in the rearview mirror, we wrote this piece for all of us to consider the extent to which we expect work to complete us and how to invest in pursuits outside of work that can indeed meet our very human need for unconditional belonging.
Grounding Our Expectations
Humans are wired for attachment and long-term bonding, though how that bonding is structured varies across cultures and history. The need to feel that we matter and belong is not peripheral to human life but regulatory. Many of us often under-appreciate how this primal need shapes our attitudes and behavior across the different spheres of our lives, including work.
And while we routinely examine romantic relationships with emotional literacy, we rarely dissect our relationship with work with comparable scrutiny, despite devoting more waking hours to it than to any intimate partner.
Like intimate relationships today, work has been burdened by escalating expectations.
Where employment once primarily provided income, it is now expected to deliver social status, economic survival, public reputation, identity, fulfillment, belonging, validation, growth, and happiness. These expanded social and economic expectations can amplify tension in the workplace. We want work to be both transactional and transcendent. In a way, we increasingly treat institutions as attachment figures.
What we are actually doing is protecting our self-concept under perceived attachment disruption. Work provides social status, identity, economic survival, and public reputation. In this lens, work ruptures, disengagement, and unmet expectations at work are processed less as mutual separation with mutual responsibility and increasingly as personal identity threat. How can reflecting on this tension help managers and employees recalibrate expectations without diminishing commitment and performance?
Redistribution of Belonging
Part of the answer may lie in historic redistribution. By the 20th century, work was no longer just a place to subsist with family — it had become a remote place to articulate our aspirations, climb the social ladder, and fill the attachment vacuum. As other traditional forms of belonging ebbed, work gradually took on the psychological load.
With this context, work becomes a plausible if imperfect anchor for belonging – a need that companies have claimed to want to oblige and provide for decades. Work as a place where our craving for love and attachment can play out and fill the void left by our diminished connection with kin and our local community. Work can offer us identity, status, routine, and the promise of relevance.
With the hope of meeting these needs, we offer our employers long-term commitment and creative energy. When we do this unrealistically and indiscriminately, we are bound to be disappointed at best and burnt out if the behaviors become blind habits.
The Regulatory System behind Belonging
Attachment theory helps us understand these dynamics. Individuals vary in their attachment styles — broadly categorized as secure, anxious, or avoidant — which shape how they interpret closeness, stability, and perceived rejection in relationships. Humans are biologically and psychologically oriented toward forming bonds that provide security, validation, and continuity.
These attachment patterns can transfer into the employment relationship. Securely attached individuals are more likely to engage deeply while tolerating ambiguity and change. Anxiously attached individuals may experience restructuring, feedback, or silence as a heightened threat. Avoidantly attached individuals may preemptively detach to preserve autonomy and therefore persistently underperform. Research suggests that fewer people are displaying secure attachments—in 2023 40% of Americans did not report secure attachment, challenging relationships across the board (More resources on the impact of stress as it relates to attachment responses at work).
When employment becomes a primary source of identity and belonging, organizational change —real or anticipatory—can activate the same threat responses associated with relational instability. The resulting anxiety, disappointment, or sense of betrayal reflects the misalignment between deeply human attachment needs and the conditional nature of economic institutions.
Traditionally, these attachment functions were distributed across intimate partners, extended kin, religious communities, and local networks. As many of these structures have weakened or become less stable, work has increasingly absorbed attachment expectations it was not institutionally designed to fulfill.
When Work Becomes the Relationship
This dynamic has been accelerating for decades. In our earlier work, From Passion to Pathos, we documented that for more than two decades the data has been unambiguous: most people are not engaged at work. Yet rather than question why work so often fails to deliver fulfillment, we have continued to ask it to do more.
Encouraged by management scholars and consultants, organizations respond with purpose statements, wellness initiatives, and the language of belonging — treating disengagement as a branding problem, as if work should give our lives meaning and fill a void.
As a result, leaders feel pressure to provide purpose, meaning, wellness, and psychological safety while still delivering results. Workers internalize disappointment and interpret misalignment as personal failure. Middle managers are caught in the middle, worn out as emotional shock absorbers they were never trained to be. Purpose becomes something to perform. We try to measure fulfillment and well-being as if they were quarterly targets.
The pattern begins early, during recruitment. Much as we do on modern dating apps, both sides present highly curated versions of themselves. Organizations highlight values and culture while downplaying stress loads, trade-offs, and dysfunction.
Mutual idealization is followed by disillusionment as institutional realities assert themselves. The problem is that even the most well-intentioned organizations in a dynamic, hyper-competitive capitalist system cannot function as family, therapist, spiritual guide, and economic engine all at once — and especially not for everyone simultaneously.
When work fails to meet these impossibly high expectations, the resulting experience can feel like heartbreak and eventually perhaps burnout.
Rather than acknowledging the gap between promise and reality, organizations offer resilience training and coping mechanisms—teaching us to adapt to disappointment rather than questioning the expectations that created it.
Modern economic and digital life amplifies this dynamic. As Sociologist Emile Durkheim observed, aspiration expands through comparison rather than necessity and anthropologist James Suzman notes, a mindset of scarcity “spurs us to work long hours to climb the social ladder and keep up with the Joneses.”
Platforms like LinkedIn turn work into a social performance, exposing us constantly to others’ promotions, titles, exits, and curated success stories. Comparison fuels imposter syndrome, perfectionism, and fear of missing out. We are performing our work for an audience. Social media provides a stage for status competition, further entangling attachment with achievement.
When the Boom Comes Off
“It is me, not you” is the famous break-up trope. Its function is regulatory: to avoid escalating emotions or provoking confrontation; preserving the dignity of the other; assuming responsibility; and, in sum, softening the blow to attachment which would provoke shame, protest, anger, or withdrawal.
However, when it comes to work, when we break up with our attachment to it either by [quiet] quitting, “rage applying,” or post layoff or termination, the relational exit conversation is usually a chorus of deflections: “it entirely is all you (toxic boss, flawed systems. evil bureaucrats, clueless leaders, etc.), and absolutely never, ever, in no way, me.” In doing so, we protect our status and competence identity, try to not internalize failure, and shield ourselves from humiliation.
In both instances, the attachment regulation system is at work to preserve our feeling of belonging: the experience state of feeling secure in a social and relational structure.
Bowling in other ponds (illustration by Francois Top)
Recalibration: Implications for Managers and Employees
If work has increasingly absorbed attachment needs once distributed across family, religion, and community, then both managers and employees might want to recalibrate their expectations accordingly—and also consider what agency they have towards alleviating each other’s attachment needs.
For Managers: Clarify the Psychological Contract
As employees bring more of their identity and emotional investment into work, managerial responsibility expands beyond coordination and performance oversight. Leaders must recognize that expectations of belonging, validation, and developmental continuity are now embedded in how many people experience employment.
Psychological contract theory has long demonstrated that perceived violations, even more than formal contractual breaches, drive disengagement, cynicism, and turnover. Most such violations stem not from deliberate deception but from unarticulated assumptions. When organizations speak in the language of “family,” “purpose,” or “long-term belonging” without specifying boundaries, they invite interpretations they cannot consistently honor. When the economic and political context shifts, and these promises are broken, the moral injury can be deep.
As managers, we can reflect on how to define the limits of the employment relationship with more precision. This recalibration includes being more transparent about performance contingencies, organizational volatility, role evolution, and the conditional nature of advancement and security. Clear articulation of mutual obligations does not weaken commitment; it reduces the likelihood that inevitable change will be interpreted as personal betrayal as it calibrates expectations.
Equally important is the normalization of exit. In dynamic labor markets, mobility is not evidence of moral deficiency or cultural failure. Framing departure as professional development rather than disloyalty allows attachment to remain healthy rather than possessive. Organizations that explicitly acknowledge impermanence are less likely to provoke resentment during transitions.
For Employees: Work Without Over identification
Employees also bear responsibility for calibrating expectations and proactively investing in their development to prepare for disruptive organizational changes. Work can provide structure, income, opportunities for personal growth and creative expression, social interaction, and a sense of contribution. These are significant goods. However, they are not equivalent to unconditional acceptance or enduring relational security.
When personal identity becomes overly fused with an occupational role, the impact of normal fluctuations in performance evaluations, promotions, or organizational direction can be amplified. This over-identification increases vulnerability to burnout and disillusionment, particularly in volatile economic environments.
A more sustainable approach is to recognize work as one domain within a broader portfolio of attachment and meaning. Diversifying sources of belonging — through relationships, communities, and pursuits outside employment — does not diminish professional dedication. Rather, it stabilizes it and makes it more sustainable by reducing emotional over-dependence on a single institutional relationship.
It is not (just) ME, nor it is (just) THEM. It is (always and also) US.
While institutions cannot guarantee permanent belonging, colleagues can meaningfully influence whether others experience mattering in the present. Mattering is conveyed through behavior: acknowledgment, responsiveness, inclusion in decisions, credit for contribution, and fair attribution of effort. Behavior is influenced by our state of mind, emotional maturity, self-awareness, and our ability to consider others’ needs as we work to get our needs met. This also means building awareness of the prevalence of scarcity mindset that elevates individual stress and undermine collective performance.
Every day, our conduct can signal whether someone is peripheral or valued. Timely feedback, public recognition, follow-through on commitments, and basic reliability reduce ambiguity and attachment threat. Exclusion, silence, and inconsistent standards exacerbate the situation. Employees and most managers cannot eliminate restructuring or control volatility; each of us can shape the microclimate in which others work and live.
When we behave in ways that affirm that others are seen, heard, and consequential, we distribute belonging horizontally rather than concentrating it vertically in the institution itself. Employees also build relationships that transcend the institution and potentially persist beyond the role.
Managing Conditional Belonging
Realism is not a retreat from ambition, engagement or performance. It aligns expectations with institutional capacity and norms. Work can matter deeply without being asked to love us.
Work can offer a degree of economic security, a site for competence, a place to apply our creative energy, structured time, social connection and the participation in a collective effort. It can contribute significantly to mental health and well-being.
What it cannot do is offer unconditional love, permanent belonging, or the absorption all of our emotional and existential needs. Belonging and mattering at work is conditional by design. Loyalty is reciprocal only insofar as interests align. Meaning and security can evaporate the moment performance dips, priorities shift, or restructuring begins.
When we romanticize work as our central source of love and attachment, we make ourselves emotionally dependent on institutions never designed to love us back.
So with Valentine’s Day in the rearview mirror, let us consider the extent to which we expect work to complete us, and then how to invest in relationships, communities, and pursuits outside of work that can indeed meet our very human need for unconditional belonging.
That way, when work comes and goes — and it always does — we remain whole.
About the Authors
Carin-Isabel Knoop is co-author of Compassionate Management of Mental Health in the Modern Workplace, a frequent contributor to Medium and LinkedIn and Executive Director at Harvard Business School.
David Ehrenthal is an Executive and Leadership Coach, Advisor, Confidant and a Principal of Mach10 Career & Leadership Coaching. David can be reached at dehrenthal@mach10career.com or 617-529-8795.