A Sense of Belonging at Work

A Guide to Improving Well-being and Performance

Lee Waller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000474343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

A sense of not belonging, that we are not accepted or valued at work can be enormously detrimental to our psychological well-being and sense of self, and can impact engagement, motivation and performance.

Based on extensive research, this accessible and practical book helps leaders understand the implications of belonging on our well-being and performance and equips them with the insight and tools to ensure their employees have a sense of belonging at work, through:

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• establishing connections and developing meaningful relationships,

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• identifying and leveraging values and strengths,

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• developing their awareness of diversity and unconscious bias,

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• fostering a psychologically safe environment in which all can speak up,

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• developing an inclusive leadership mindset and

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• challenging negative thinking patterns.

The strategies and tips provided will allow readers to ensure they too have a strong sense of belonging at work.

This book is designed for leaders in organisations who are responsible for the performance and well-being of their teams and for anyone who has experienced a sense of not belonging and wants to understand how to develop a sense of belonging now and in the future. It will also be of value to HR professionals and coaches, who are seeking to develop positive, inclusive workplaces.

Part 1 What it means to belong

1 Belonging – a fundamental human need

DOI: 10.4324/9781003108849-3

Belonging is about feeling as if you have a place, as if you matter as if you have a set of relationships that really matter with people.

– Neil, Head of Residential Care Home

Belonging matters. Type ‘sense of belonging’ into Google and you will come across 148 million hits.¹ Make your way through the first part of this book, and you will discover the plethora of research that has been dedicated to uncovering the causes, consequences and power of this phenomenon. Talk about ‘belonging’ with anyone from an eight-year-old child to a 90-year-old grandmother, a stay-at-home mum, a bin-man, an accountant, a CEO or a neuro-surgeon – they will all know what it is that you mean. And most of them will spontaneously, if privately, recall a time when they either felt like they did belong, or a time when they felt they did not.

During my lifetime I have been a part of two close-knit social groups. The first, a group of slightly mis-fitting goths, hippies and rockers, in my late teens. The second a group of bright, passionate, articulate house-music lovers in my mid-twenties. During both of these times, these groups kept me grounded, solid, safe and self-assured. They were my tribe, my support and they affirmed my sense of self. I see similar groups all around me all the time – in pubs, restaurants, on beaches, in the workplace – groups of people who click, connect, understand and support each other. And they make me smile with vicarious pleasure. The impact of belonging to these groups on our well-being, our ability to be ourselves, to feel good about ourselves, is tangible – visceral and significant.

I have already referred to my experiences of the opposite in the introduction to this book, and sadly this is an equally prevalent and powerful experience for others: The classic scenario depicted in so many teen programmes, of being the last to be picked for the football team; the experience of the lonely school bench or empty chairs in the work canteen; not being invited to the party or the meeting; being excluded from the private joke or simply an unprovoked sense that you just do not fit. With these experiences comes the urge to withdraw, to self-protect, to ‘pretend’ and to not be ourselves. Perhaps this is a rite of passage to adulthood. But the emotional and psychological impact is still acute, it is often painful and as we mature, it can become troubling and the impact enduring.

So, why is the experience, whether positive or negative, so very powerful? Why is it felt so acutely? Why is it able to affect both how we think, feel and behave? Put simply, the answer is because human beings are social animals. Belonging keeps us safe and keeps us alive.

Motivators of human behaviour

Psychology is the science of behaviour, and for the past couple of centuries it has been incumbent upon psychologists to determine why we behave the way that we do. What is it that directs our thinking and motivates our behaviour? This work has resulted in, amongst many, many other things, the development of a number of theories of motivation.^{2, 3}

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, whilst not always finding scholarly support, is nevertheless the most familiar theory of human motivation, and one which has made its way into common parlance.⁴ According to the theory, our behaviour is driven by a desire to satisfy one of five basic human needs: Physiological needs; safety needs; belongingness or love needs; self-esteem needs; and self-actualisation needs (see Figure 1.1). Maslow proposed that these needs are related to each other in a hierarchy insofar as the higher needs will not receive attention until the lower needs are at least partially satisfied, and that behaviour will be focused primarily on the satisfaction of that need until it is.

Figure 1.1 Maslow's hierarchy of needs, 1943.⁷

Whilst this argument is somewhat common-sensical – if I am homeless and hungry, I am unlikely to be distracted by a need to be creative – it might not necessarily be the case that a sense of connection or a perception of respect from others would be of no importance in that scenario. And indeed, whilst the needs outlined do resonate with other theories, research has found little support for their hierarchical nature.⁵ However, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does help us to understand how our behaviour becomes directed by our most immediate and pressing need, one of which, according to Maslow, is the need to belong.

The need to belong is also a component of Alderfer’s three-stage model, including existence, relatedness and growth needs (ERG).⁶ Existence needs refer to the concern with subsistence such as food, water, money and working conditions; relatedness refers to our need to develop and maintain interpersonal relationships with friends, family, peers and other working groups; and growth refers to our need for personal development, such as our ability to contribute, and to be creative. McClelland’s 3-needs theory⁸ also identified three motivational needs in which achievement referred to the need to excel and succeed, power referred to the need to influence others and affiliation referred to the need to be liked and approved of. Finally, Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory⁹ suggests that human motivation is determined by the pursuit of the three innate needs of autonomy, competence and again, relatedness.

As such, whilst there is a lack of agreement in terms of the number and types of need that drive human behaviour, there are clear and apparent parallels across the theories, and all of the models consider the need to belong, described as ‘belongingness,’ ‘relatedness’ or ‘affiliation,’ as a fundamental motivator of the way that we behave.

A fundamental and universal human need

This need to belong is central to the work of notable social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, who developed the belonging hypothesis.¹⁰ According to their theory “Human beings are fundamentally and pervasively motivated by a need to belong, that is, by a strong desire to form and maintain enduring interpersonal attachments.”¹¹ The need to belong, they argue, has a significant impact on how we think, feel and behave, and drives behaviour designed to enhance our sense of belonging. As you will discover in the chapters in the first part of this book, there is a wealth of research that supports the significant impact of the need to belong, or the impact of thwarting of the need to belong on our well-being and behaviour. But the fundamental nature of the need also finds theoretical and scientific support from a number of disciplines. Anthropological studies, for example, consistently found that people in all societies will naturally form into groups. And sociological studies, particularly those exploring in-group behaviour have found that individuals will spontaneously form into groups, develop in-group social bonds and treat members of their own group with favouritism compared to members of other groups.^{12, 13, 14}

In the classic Robbers Cave experiments, Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues randomly allocated 12-year-old boys into two groups in order to explore the development of social bonds and the concept of ethnocentrism – that we are driven to preferably evaluate aspects of our own group.^{15, 16} Keeping the two groups apart for the first week whilst they worked to achieve common goals (such as completing a treasure hunt or building apparatus), the authors first found that the two groups rapidly formed bonds between members of their group. They developed a group structure by instituting a hierarchy of status positions, established group norms and attitudes, such as naming their groups and referring to objects as ‘ours,’ and created group characteristics, such as being ‘tough.’ The authors also found that when competition was introduced between the two groups, fierce opposition developed, expressed through actions such as burning the other group’s flag or eating their food, as well as characterising them in unfavourable terms.

Whilst it could be that development of these intra-group bonds was a necessary requirement of working effectively together in order to successfully achieve group goals, social identity theory researchers have found that even when no requirement to work together exists, arbitrary assignment to groups results in in-group favouritism. For example, over a series of studies, John Howard and Myron Rothbart¹⁷ found that arbitrary assignment to groups resulted in individuals allocating more favourable statements (such as ‘I took disadvantaged kids on a 2-week vacation’) to members of their in-group and describing them with more favourable adjectives (such as friendly, likable or cooperative). They also more accurately recognised unfavourable behaviours associated with the members of the out-group than they did their own group. These types of studies all suggest that the need to belong is so fundamental to us as human beings that it not only drives our behaviour but can also direct our thinking.

Evidence of the universal nature of the need to belong and the cognitive and behavioural impact of this need is found all around us, in all modern societies, in many modern sociological phenomena. For example, in cities all around the world, adolescents, young adults and now increasingly children are joining gangs. Recent UK government statistics put the number of children in gangs between the age of 10 and 15 at 27,000, and 6% of 10–19-year-olds report belonging to a gang.¹⁸ Whilst there are many socio-economic factors related to gang membership, many members are motivated to join gangs for the sense of identity and sense of belonging they afford.¹⁹ We see this too in the formation of school and workplace cliques – exclusive circles of individuals who spend time together and make it clear that not anyone can join their group, either actively or passively excluding and ostracising others.²⁰ These cliques form primarily through a desire to establish an identity, a sense of acceptance and belonging.

As these two examples indicate, our need to belong can often evolve into negative, destructive and prejudiced attitudes and actions. Racism, xenophobia and homophobia are all examples of our inherent need to think better about ourselves by thinking badly about and acting poorly towards others. These patterns of thought can be so engrained and fundamental that they become blind to logic, reason or rational argument. But they serve our need to belong. Steve Taylor, senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, argues that these forms of prejudice are a self-defence mechanism designed to protect us from feelings of insignificance and inadequacy.²¹ He proposes that racism involves five different stages of defence, the first of which is driven by a need to belong – a desire to establish an identity by affiliating with and establishing a sense of belonging to a group. However, in attempting to strengthen this sense of identity and belonging, this at first innocuous motivation can move to enmity, hostility and conflict with ‘other’ groups. empathy towards the ‘other’ diminishes as compassion and benevolence towards the in-group increases. The ‘other’ becomes homogenised, prejudice generalised and the ‘other’ eventually...