Inclusive leadership as the missing infrastructure: reframing peer support worker withdrawal as a failure of belonging

Purpose This viewpoint aims to challenge the prevailing assumption in mental health service literature that peer support worker (PSW) disengagement and turnover are primarily workforce-management problems, solvable through clearer job descriptions, certification and pay. It argues instead that PSW withdrawal is frequently a leadership failure: organisations formally invite peer workers into clinical structures without leaders doing the relational work of including them. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on leader inclusiveness theory, the workplace inclusion model and qualitative evidence on the occupational identity of PSWs, this viewpoint distinguishes between the structural inclusion organisations claim (policy commitments, job titles, headcount targets) and the relational inclusion peer workers actually experience day-to-day from their leaders and teams. Findings PSWs already occupy a liminal occupational identity, suspended between lived experience and clinical professionalism. Where leaders fail to convert structural inclusion into everyday relational inclusion, this liminality curdles into a self-protective withdrawal here termed Liminal Exile: peer workers remain procedurally compliant and outwardly present while quietly disengaging from the disclosure and relational risk-taking that justified their employment in the first place. This withdrawal is frequently misread as low engagement, poor role fit or workforce attrition, when it is in fact evidence that leadership has not extended psychological safety to a role built on personal disclosure. Practical implications Services must move beyond hiring peer workers and writing role descriptions toward leaders actively practising inclusiveness: redistributing decision authority, visibly modelling allyship and institutionalising peer-inclusive reflective supervision. These are leadership behaviours, not HR policies, and require deliberate investment separate from the peer support budget line. Originality/value This paper reframes PSW attrition, usually diagnosed as a structural or workforce-design problem, as a relational deficit in inclusive leadership. It introduces Liminal Exile as a construct naming the specific form of disengagement that arises when structurally sanctioned but relationally unsupported identities become untenable to sustain openly.