The Leadership-Belonging Gap: Six Questions We Need to Answer

Organizations invest heavily in leadership development and cultural change, yet employee well-being, retention, and engagement remain persistently low. We argue that leadership scholarship has overlooked a more fundamental relational question: whether leaders and followers feel that they belong. Belonging is a basic psychological need associated with acceptance, motivation, persistence, connection, and mattering, but it remains peripheral to leadership research. Bringing leadership scholarship into conversation with the Belongingness Hypothesis and the social psychology of belonging, we integrate three complementary lenses: belonging with people through interpersonal relationships, belonging as someone through social identity theory, and belonging somewhere through place-attachment. From this synthesis, we propose six questions concerning the boundaries of belonging, leadership in hybrid and work-from-anywhere settings, workspace design, leaders’ own belonging, the social distance created by power, and employees’ shifting anchors of belonging across work, family, and community. These questions establish a sense of belonging as a core relational foundation through which leading and following create meaning, reciprocity, and enable people to contribute. We offer a research agenda for locating belonging within leadership theory and practical principles for cultivating connection without reducing belonging to mandated proximity, manufactured friendship, or another engagement metric.