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The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of commitment in the relationship between protégés’ anxious attachment styles and feedback behaviors of both mentors and protégés.

Data were collected from 100 academic protégé-mentor dyads, and reports from both members of the mentoring relationships were used to test hypotheses.

The results suggested that protégé perceptions of mentor commitment and self-reported protégé commitment mediated the relationships between protégé anxious attachment style and protégé feedback seeking and feedback acceptance. Additionally, mentor perceptions of protégé commitment played an important role, mediating the relationships between protégé anxious attachment and quality and quantity of mentor feedback.

Taken together, the results reveal the important role of perceptions of partner commitment in high-quality mentoring behaviors.

This study was among the first to examine feedback and commitment in academic mentoring relationships, particularly taking into account commitment of each member of the dyad as well as their perceptions of the other person’s commitment.

This chapter discusses how attachment theory, a theory that provides insight into the processes through which psychological and emotional bonds are developed in relationships, can be useful for understanding mentoring relationships. We develop a conceptual model emphasizing how attachment-related constructs and their relationships with mentors’ and protégés’ behaviors and emotions influence each phase of a mentoring relationship. Recognizing reciprocity in the mentoring process, the model also explains how the interpersonal dynamics of the mentor–protégé relationship influence the benefits gained by both partners. Propositions for future research on mentoring relationships are provided. We contend that examining mentoring through the lens of attachment theory can increase our understanding of the underlying factors or mechanisms that determine individuals’ involvement in mentoring relationships and differentiate successful from unsuccessful mentoring relationships. The research and practical implications are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine psychological attachment styles (secure, anxious, and avoidant) as antecedents to leader-member exchange (LMX) quality both directly and through their impact on employees’ efforts to build high quality LMX relationships. Employees with secure attachment styles are proposed to be successful at building high quality LMX relationships while employees with anxious and avoidant styles are proposed to display the opposite effect.

Data were collected through a survey of 213 employees nested in 37 work groups. Hypotheses were tested using multilevel modeling within MPlus.

Results indicated that secure and anxious attachment styles were associated with LMX only by impacting the exertion of effort specifically aimed at relationship development with the manager. Alternatively, the avoidant style was directly and negatively linked to LMX but not associated with effort undertaken to build a high quality relationship.

The effects of attachment style on effort to develop high quality LMX relationships reveal that subordinate attachment style may impact those subordinates’ ability and interest in developing positive LMX relationships. Therefore, managers may need to purposively deviate from typical LMX development processes in order to create a more conducive environment for developing high quality relationships with subordinates of differing attachment styles.

This study is one of the first to examine the mediating impact of effort to build high quality LMX relationships given personal propensities (attachment style) to form relationships in the workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the inter-relationships between product category embarrassment, consumption contexts, individual’s attachment styles, and their combined effects on individual’s preference toward online and physical store channels while buying embarrassing products.

Experimental design was employed by taking a sample of young adult students.

The results of this study shows that embarrassing product class and social consumption context can potentially elicit embarrassment. Anxiously attached individuals are more prone to be embarrassed compared to the individuals adopting secure and avoidant attachment styles.

Value of the paper lies in empirically investigating the complex inter-relationships between product class-specific embarrassment, context specific embarrassment, individual’s attachment styles and buying channel selection.

This conceptual article provides a basis for designing leader development programs that assess and train leaders to recognize demands for communication and how their personality affects the ways they transmit information, influence others and form positive relationships.

Adult attachment theory, Big Five personality dimensions (extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience and neuroticism) and pro-social and social sensitivity personality traits are proposed to shape the extent to which leaders enact relational, transmission and manipulative models of communication. These personality dimensions and communication models are the basis for assessment and training leaders to use in-person and various electronic media in ways that promote listeners’ attention, understanding and psychological safety.

Secure attachment leaders who are extraverted, prosocial and socially sensitive are proposed to use high touch media to communicate in ways that establish positive relationships. Avoidant and anxious attachment leaders use low-touch media that are manipulative or mitigate accountability.

The behaviors associated with transmitting information, influencing others and forming relationships can be a basis for assessing leaders’ attachment styles. Leaders can learn to diagnose situations to determine the best mixes of communication models to meet the demands of the situation.

Leaders who are promoted to higher levels of responsibility need to learn how to communicate with multiple stakeholders often during times of challenge and stress. How they communicate is likely to be a function of their comfort with interpersonal relationships, which in turn affects their use of personal and impersonal media.

Studies on restrictive engulfment (RE) – a subtype of psychological aggression in intimate relationships – have focused either on insecure attachment or relationship satisfaction, not both. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate relationship satisfaction as a potential mediator of the associations between anxious and avoidant attachment and RE perpetration among college students.

A sample of 322 college students (178 women, 137 men, and seven other gender-identified) completed the experiences in close relationship inventory, relationship assessment scale, and RE subscale of the multidimensional measure of emotional abuse.

Among the sample, 89.3 and 90.5 percent of the college women and men, respectively, reported to have used isolating, restricting, monitoring, and controlling behaviors. The results of structural equation modeling revealed that all direct paths except for that from avoidant attachment to RE were significant. Moreover, significant indirect paths were identified from anxious and avoidant attachment to RE via relationship satisfaction.

The results of this study should be interpreted with consideration of the study’s limitations. First, the data were drawn from a convenience sample of Turkish college students. Second, the design of the study is correlational; therefore, we cannot assume causality. Finally, this study utilized self-report and retrospective data.

Though the findings are preliminary, they may inform college counselors and other mental health practitioners about the nature of RE within college students’ dating relationships. College students who are unhappy with their dating relationships but still in those relationships (i.e. they choose not to leave) should be assessed for whether they are the perpetrators and/or recipients of psychological aggression, especially in light of the high rates of this form of aggression in the current and previous studies. Furthermore, assessing psychological dating aggression perpetrators for insecure attachment styles may help mental health professionals who work with college students, envisage the sessions toward areas in the need of improvement, such as their views of themselves and others. Self-esteem, feelings of insecurity and inadequacy in relationships, and dependency can be worked with these clients.

The results of this study also have implications for the prevention of psychological aggression before it occurs. The need for prevention programs is evident in the high rates of psychologically controlling behaviors among college students. It may be useful to implement campus wide programs to raise awareness regarding psychological aggression, such as through events, seminars, posters, flyers, and talks with student groups.

Despite the limitations of this study, its findings offer insight into the factors that influence the perpetration of psychological aggression within dating relationships among college students. Adult attachment theory offers a useful lens for understanding the possible driving forces behind college students’ controlling behaviors toward their dating partners. In particular, college students who demonstrate an insecure attachment style – and especially an anxious attachment style – combined with low levels of relationship satisfaction appear to be at a high risk for perpetrating RE behaviors.

Despite a robust link between poor caregiver attachment and antisociality, few studies have examined the influence of parentification and emotional resilience on delinquency in later life, in groups at differing risk for antisocial conduct. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This pilot study compared the influence of parentification, attachment style (avoidance or anxious) and emotional resilience on adulthood antisocial behaviour in an offender and normative sample. Of the 137 participants in this study, 66 were supervised by the National Probation Service (age M=36.90, SD=13.91), and 71 were recruited from community-dwelling and student populations (age M=31.83, SD=13.25).

In partial support of the predictions, participants in the offender group reported significantly greater levels of attachment anxiety compared to the normative group. However, emotional resilience was positively associated with antisociality in the normative sample.

This small-scale investigation indicates value in exploring these specific variables in a larger, matched samples study, to enable clearer comparisons to be made between offender and normative groups.

The preliminary findings suggest that attachment anxiety is associated with antisociality in offender populations, which indicate a therapeutic focus on attachment anxiety as part of correctional care and offender rehabilitation.

This study is novel in its aim to examine the influence of childhood parentification, attachment deficits and emotional resilience on adulthood antisociality in participants from a high-risk offender sample and non-high-risk normative sample.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of service failure severity on brand forgiveness and to investigate the moderating effects of interpersonal attachment styles and thinking styles on the service failure severity–brand forgiveness relationship.

The authors used retrospective experience sampling to collect the data and structural equation modeling (AMOS 24) to analyze 570 responses collected via an online survey.

This study shows that the service failure severity–brand forgiveness relationship is not always negative, as different conditions may amplify or weaken it. Specifically, a secure attachment style and holistic thinking weaken the negative impact of service failure severity on brand forgiveness, whereas an anxious attachment style and analytic thinking negatively amplify the relationship. An avoidance attachment style did not appear to play a role.

This study should help hotels fine-tune their segmentation, targeting and positioning efforts and may also help in implementing more focused recovery strategies.

This study provides insights into the role of psychological traits in amplifying/reducing the negative impact of service failure severity on brand forgiveness, thus showing the importance of developing the psychological profiles of customers beyond demographic profiling. The emotional and cognitive typologies of consumers are key to understanding the dependence of forgiveness on service failure severity.

This research is conducted in the context of beauty salons in India, to investigate how enhanced perceived acceptance in interpersonal relationships through consuming beauty salon services can generate narcissistic brand love among consumers via the mediation of brand happiness. It also investigates the moderating impact of consumer's anxious interpersonal attachment style and cynicism on the relationship between perceived salon brand-interpersonal acceptance goal congruence and salon brand happiness.

To test the hypothesized relationships, a survey was conducted among 225 regular consumers of beauty salon brands. The data were analyzed using Hayes' (2017) process macro in SPSS.

The results suggest that perceived goal congruence between beauty salon brand-interpersonal acceptance positively influences brand happiness, which in turn predicts consumer's narcissistic brand love. Consumer's anxious interpersonal attachment style positively moderates the effect of brand-interpersonal acceptance goal congruence on brand happiness, while cynicism negatively moderates the path.

Value of the study lies in extending interpersonal acceptance and rejection (IPAR) theory to the domain of consumer–salon brand relationship, to posit that if salon brands satisfy consumers' interpersonal acceptance goals, there is a potential for such happy consumers to love the salon brand, albeit narcissistically.

Extant research suggests that consumers value the pursuit, attainment and retention of income security and financial well-being (FWB). The authors aim to expand the relevant literature by examining how consumers' psychosocial characteristics affect and are affected by the pursuit of those objectives.

The authors utilize partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to evaluate the authors' hypotheses based on a sample of USA and Canadian consumers (n = 619).

The authors' PLS-SEM results provide support for the authors' hypotheses, indicating that individuals' insecure attachments – anxious and avoidant – relate negatively to their income security and FWB. The authors' results also show that these two desirable states relate positively to individuals' undesirable state of social loneliness.

The authors' methodology and findings illuminate the positioning of psychosocial factors as antecedents to and outcomes of income security and FWB. This research also provides a basis for understanding the linear vs curvilinear influences of income security on an individual’s social life.

In the present empirical study, the authors present a rare empirical examination of individuals' income security and FWB as outcomes of their psychosocial profile vis-à-vis insecure attachments. Drawing on established psychometric scales, this study expands the consumer psychology and FWB literature, showing significant linkages between insecure attachments, income security, FWB and social loneliness.