Abstract
<p>Leadership research has produced a large and still-growing catalogue of styles, among them transformational, authentic and servant leadership, but no biologically grounded principle from which those styles might be derived or organised. We propose that attachment, understood through contemporary social neuroscience, can serve as that principle. Human beings do not regulate the demands of a challenging environment as isolated individuals but relationally, treating the resources of trusted others as functionally continuous with their own, and attachment is the mechanism through which this relational management of a finite bioenergetic budget is organised under stress. The leader-follower relationship is structurally suited to operate as an attachment relationship, and the quality of leadership depends substantially on how reliably a leader fills that role. We develop this claim into an attachment-informed leadership (AIL) framework, following a single line of reasoning from social connection and health, through social allostasis, to attachment and caregiving, and extending it into predictive regulation, interpersonal synchrony and the transfer of caregiving capacities from parenting to leadership. Read in these terms, leadership is first and foremost an attachment-based relationship in which the leader's central task is to become a reliable attachment figure for those they lead.</p>