The aim of this chapter is to introduce attachment theory (Bowlby, 1997 [1969]) in terms of context-specific attachment styles, and the stability and changeability of attachment style.

An attachment relationship exists not only between children and parents, but also in other relationship contexts. Bowlby (1997 [1969]) has suggested that when people cannot build a securely attached relationship with their primary caregivers, they will try to find secondary attachment figures. Moreover, when individuals grow up, their life domain is not restricted to their family, parents or primary caregivers. An individual's attachment behaviour may be directed to persons, groups or institutions other than the family, and these targets can serve as subordinate attachment figures or principal attachment figures for some people. This proposition suggests that a context-specific attachment relationship is more proximal to influencing behaviour in that specific context, which provides the necessary background for understanding attachment relationships at work when discussing employees’ proactive behaviour.

This issue also implies the changeability of attachment style. Although attachment style and the internal working models developed from early life experiences are relatively stable and constitute one's personal characteristics, attachment theory also posits that people's attachment style and internal working models can be changed when they encounter different experiences. This proposition addresses the issue of psychosocial development and suggests opportunities for personal interventions.

Attachment style in different social contexts

Although attachment theory suggests that an individual's attachment style is primarily shaped by interaction experiences with primary caregivers, it also suggests that an individual can have different attachment relationships with different persons and thus form different attachment styles across different contexts. Specifically, Bowlby stated:

Several empirical studies have supported this view by examining attachment to family, friends and partners (Overall et al, 2003; Sibley and Overall, 2008), attachment to supervisors (Game, 2008), attachment at work (Neustadt et al, 2006), attachment toward social groups (Smith et al, 1999) and attachment to God (Granqvist and Kirkpatrick, 2008).

As an academician with a long scholarly record, and a businessman with many successes and failures, I have always believed that finance was the single most powerful locomotive of economic prosperity and social progress. The industry was already properly structured but it could be even better if only public authorities kept their hands off the profession. I loved mathematical finance and enjoyed teaching it to others – with unquestioned confidence in its benefits for society.

This was all until the year 2008, when the greatest financial crisis of all times shocked the world and also when, as an irony of fate, I was appointed to chair the securities regulator of my country. Most of my tenure of office was in highly hectic meetings of international organizations, basically discussing what was wrong with finance. In time, most of my prior beliefs about the wisdom of finance started to fade away. I realized that the global financial system was fundamentally flawed and finance, in its current state, had become more harmful than useful for society. Today, I feel the agony of seeing that not much has changed ten years after the global crisis. And the call of duty was to write this short book to provoke wiser people to think about how we can fix finance.

Many people deserve my sincere thanks for their help and support. Serhat Çevikel and Ceyhun Elgin of Boğaziçi University corrected many errors in earlier versions of the book. Serdar Çelik of the OECD and Tim Reid of Deutsche Bank provided valuable data. Paul Stevens, Caroline Astley-Brown and Ruth Wallace of Bristol University Press were graciously supportive through the whole process. Anonymous reviewers’ comments were much improving. I am thankful to the Turkish government for tasking me with regulating financial markets in the midst of a global crisis – a task which turned out to be the school of a lifetime. Last but not least, I thank my wife and daughters for their patience and support. They did not read a single page of the book but they loved the pink cover, maybe signalling that it is time to put some pink into colorless finance.

What makes people more likely to initiate positive change within their organizations? I have sought to address this question during my doctoral research and adopted a relational perspective based on attachment theory to understand employee proactivity. In this book, I take the same perspective and extend my previous work by proposing a theoretical model to explain why having a sense of attachment security in social relationships can strengthen an individual's proactivity.

This book aims to bring an academic contribution from a new angle to understand why employees engage in proactive behaviour. At the same time, this project involves topicality by addressing the question of how to promote employees’ proactive behaviour, which has been widely asked in management. In this book I specifically focus on how attachment theory can be used to understand motivation and antecedents of proactive behaviour but do not intend to cover all topics, such as consequences of proactive behaviour. I have made this decision because I believe a narrow focus provides a greater degree of elaboration. Another reason for focusing on motivation and antecedents of proactive behaviour is to use attachment theory to develop a theoretical framework that integrates current understandings of motivational factors in shaping proactive behaviour. Although proactivity has been widely studied, a lack of an integrative theoretical framework has resulted in a patchwork of proactivity research. In this book I seek to elaborate why attachment theory can offer a theoretical framework that integrates the existing knowledge of proactivity and indicates directions for future research.

This book is partly based on my doctoral dissertation. Here I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my doctoral supervisor, Dr Sharon Parker, who led me to study proactivity and continues to give me encouragement, guidance and support to build an academic career. I am deeply indebted to Dr Yi-Cheng Lin and Dr Kaiping Yao for their supervision during my undergraduate and postgraduate training in psychology at National Taiwan University. Dr Lin evoked my research interests in attachment theory and guided me towards studying adult attachment in several projects. Dr Yao strengthened my research interests by encouraging me to use attachment theory for a course assignment as a lens to understand religion and quality of life. It is their guidance and encouragement that have supported my research journey on attachment from the very beginning.

This chapter aims to look into individual and situational factors of attachment security to offer a relational perspective to explain why there are individual differences in employee proactivity and how managers and organizations can influence employee proactivity. First, the concept of attachment styles is used to explain individual differences in employee proactivity. The chapter then elaborates how relationships with different targets at work (for example, relationships with supervisors/leaders, work groups and organizations) can influence employees’ sense of attachment security at work and shape their proactivity at work.

Individual differences in proactivity

Why do people differ in their general propensity to be proactive? According to attachment theory, the answer lies in individual differences in the development of attachment styles from earlier interactions with caregivers. In brief, based on the proposition regarding a positive link between attachment security and proactivity, individuals displaying high levels of attachment security in their attachment styles are more likely to be proactive. As such, among the three attachment styles (that is, secure attachment, avoidant attachment and ambivalent attachment), individuals possessing secure attachment styles with their caregivers are more likely to be proactive than individuals with avoidant attachment or ambivalent attachment styles.

Individuals possessing secure attachment styles tend be proactive because, first, they are future-oriented and are able to identify goals to bring about changes that will influence their future (that is, goal envisioning) and second, they tend to possess positive self-views, have stronger autonomous motivation, and experience energy from interactions with others, and thus have more goal-regulatory resources for approaching proactive goals. They are more likely to be future-oriented because, through reliable interactions with their caregivers, they understand the relationship between their actions and the subsequent feedback. This in turn enables them to develop a sense of contingency, using their actions to influence future events. Supporting this line of reasoning, Laghi and colleagues (2009) found secure attachment to parents and peers in adolescents was positively correlated with future orientation, and noted that ‘those who are secure in their attachment and in peer relationships consider themselves to be more capable and willing to explore, which is widely intended as an autonomous and proactive ability to make future plans’ (2009: 191). Future orientation can contribute to individuals’ proactivity because it helps individuals think ahead, identify goals that they would like to achieve and create a vision that motivates them to achieve these goals.

Research on proactivity has so far mainly considered proactivity as an individual's action and used a sell-regulation perspective to understand employee proactive behaviour at work. Nevertheless, proactivity is very often relational, in part because it is often necessary to manage disapproval and resistance from other stakeholders in the work context (Morrison and Bies, 1991; Frese and Fay, 2001; Ashford et al, 2003; Parker et al, 2010). Similarly, when behaving proactively, an individual often needs to interact closely with and influence peers and supervisors in order to obtain the information and resources needed to bring about change (Thompson, 2005). As such, the extent to which employees are proactive is determined by how they interact with other stakeholders in the work context. Building on attachment theory, this book has proposed that attachment security is the key that activates and facilitates operation of the behavioural system of proactivity (Chapter Four) and suggested that attachment styles and different stakeholders in the work context (that is, leaders, work teams and the organization) can be sources of attachment security in shaping employee proactivity at work (Chapter Five).

The aim of this chapter is to highlight the implications for employee proactivity research of the model proposed in Chapters Four and Five. First, the chapter discusses how attachment theory provides a different angle from alternative approaches for understanding the relational basis of employee proactivity. Next, it elaborates how the attachment theory strengthens a dispositional approach to understanding employee proactivity, and then highlights the value of the proposed model in integrating the different conceptualizations and motivational mechanisms in proactivity research. Finally, it indicates avenues for future research on employee proactivity specifically and extends the discussion to elaborate how attachment theory can help understand work behaviour broadly.

Relational basis of employee proactivity

Although different approaches can be adopted capture the relational basis of proactivity, the approach in this book, of building on attachment theory, provides a stronger theoretical foundation for unpacking the relational basis of proactivity. For example, in order to examine whether those who tend to build positive relationships with others will be more proactive at work, previous studies have examined the association between trait agreeableness from the ‘big-five’ personality framework (i.e., a trait theory of personality focusing on the five broad traits – conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion) and employee proactive behaviour (for example, LePine and Van Dyne, 2001; Major et al, 2006; Crant et al, 2011).

Introduction

The transformation of global retail that has taken place over the past three decades is associated with changing gendered patterns of work. The previous two chapters explored this transformation empirically, fleshing out the commercial dynamics of global retailers and their supply networks as well as the role fragmented work plays in facilitating global value chains. Global retail expansion has fed on and fuelled the changing role of women who constitute the majority of their customers and increasingly juggle paid work with household responsibilities. Global sourcing provides the channel through which a wide range of goods is available at reasonably affordable prices on a JIT basis. Hundreds of millions of workers, a significant proportion female, are now deployed in labour-intensive global production, mainly in emerging and low-income countries.

This chapter focuses on the analytical dimension of the global retail transformation and associated changing gender patterns of work. The rise of global retail value chains challenges the underlying assumptions of much conventional analysis of markets, labour and gender. Prevailing analyses of production and trade have largely assumed that exchange takes place through markets within and between countries. Yet in global value chains, lead firms govern their supply chains without ownership, and coordinate production and trade across suppliers spanning multiple countries.

Prevailing analysis of labour has largely assumed the predominance of an employer–employee relationship regulated within national labour markets. Yet in retail value chains, lead firms that operate outside the national legal jurisdiction of suppliers and their workers can also influence supplier employment relations. Prevailing analysis of gender tends to assume a division of labour between the productive sphere of paid work and the reproductive sphere of unpaid work. Yet in retail value chains, the commercialization of household consumer goods and the feminization of employment are blurring the boundaries between productive and reproductive labour, as well as paid and unpaid work.

This chapter analytically addresses the core questions of this book: How are global retail value chains shaping gender patterns of work, and what are the gendered outcomes for workers? I draw on a combination of analytical approaches to investigate this question.

Rise of Global Retail

The rise of global retail has transformed the production, distribution and sale of food and consumer goods with significant consequences for the gender profile of work in the Global South. Global retailers play a key role in the provision and global sourcing of a wide range of consumer goods across national borders through global value chains (Coe and Wrigley 2009; Hamilton, Petrovic and Senauer 2011). Global value chains are summed up as ‘the full range of activities which are required to bring a product or service from conception, through the different phases of production (involving a combination of physical transformation and the input of various producer services), delivery to final consumers, and final disposal after use’ (Kaplinsky and Morris 2002, 8). Well established in North America and Europe, global retail is rapidly becoming more prevalent in emerging and lower-income economies (Reardon et al. 2003).

Women are drawn into global value chains as farmers, wage-workers, employees, buyers and customers (Dolan and Sorby 2003; Hale and Wills 2005). As retailers expand their market scope, they are commercializing many unpaid activities previously undertaken by women within households. Global retail and sourcing generate paid work for hundreds of millions of workers in emerging and low-income countries, drawing in a significant proportion of women with limited previous labour market access (ILO 2015b). Often they are involved in producing goods women had made or prepared in the home. Retail value chains link firms at each stage from production through distribution to final retail and final consumers (Kaplinsky and Morris 2002). A key argument of this book is that their growth has been based on commercialization of many activities previously undertaken, unpaid, by women in the home, helping to draw women into fragmented paid work in their production. They therefore blur traditional gendered boundaries between paid work in commercial production and unpaid work within households.

These processes play out differently across geographical locations, where gender norms shaping the division of labour and women's participation in productive and reproductive activities can vary greatly. Often, retail can disrupt long-established gender norms, but the outcomes for promoting gender equality appear mixed both across sectors and locations. Women workers are largely concentrated in low-wage, labour-intensive production.