Why do some people disengage from a group or choose to leave it?

by Tracy Reader, Organisational Development Consultant

When someone chooses to leave a group or reduce their interaction with it, it can leave us with many unanswered questions. Many of these questions centre on “why” and our minds seek answers to thoughts such as “am I to blame?” or “how could we change this situation?” Why do some people disengage from a group or choose to leave it?

It is particularly useful to find answers to these questions in situations where the group is negatively affected by a person leaving or becoming estranged – such as in a work environment or family situation where others in the group feel a sense of loss, rejection or loneliness as a result of one or more individuals disengaging or leaving.

Indeed, issues revolving around estrangement are emotional and complex. Causes of estrangement can be related, and not limited to toxic behaviours, major life events, betrayal, and mental illness. Estrangement may also be related to personality differences, and misunderstandings.

If we view estrangement as a problem to be solved, perhaps KAI can lend some insight to why someone may want to disengage. Meaning, a person has decided to distance themselves from an individual or group as the solution to their problem of dealing with issues in a distressed relationship. While motives, values, situation, and incidents that happened in the past certainly matter, we will focus here on whether it is the problem-solving style of the individuals who have left the group, as well as those who remain committed to it, that could help answer those all-important “why” questions.

KAI (Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory) measures one’s problem-solving style on a continuum ranging from strong adaption to strong innovation, with most people having a style somewhere towards the middle. One’s problem-solving style is not related to one’s intelligence, learned skills, experiences, motivations, values, culture, and doesn’t change given a different situation or environment. As a pure measure of problem-solving style, the KAI can be useful in determining if one’s preference for structure while solving a problem may be significant given a particular context. In short:

• More adaptive individuals prefer situations in which there is more structure and greater group conformity.
• More innovative individuals favor environments that are less constrained and where there is opportunity for individuals to do things differently.

It may be considered that very strongly adaptive or very strongly innovative individuals (as positioned along the KAI continuum) may lead to individuals becoming frustrated and estranged from their peers if the culture of the group does not fit their preferred thinking style. For example, if the prevalent culture is too ‘innovative’, strong adaptors are likely to become frustrated if they are unable to operate within a familiar agreed upon framework or structure that they find comforting. On the other hand, if the culture is too ‘adaptive’, strong innovators may become frustrated if they find the rules and protocols of the organisation too repressing.

In his 1987 PhD thesis: The meaning and measurement of adolescent estrangement, British psychologist Dr Sean Hammond developed a measure of estrangement designed to assess the resulting psychological malaise which is termed Anomia or Alienation in social-psychological research literature. Anomie refers to a lack of usual social or ethical standards in a situation and alienation refers to feeling of being disconnected from others. Both can lead to estrangement, which in turn can lead to loneliness for those involved. Hammond’s measure of estrangement was designed for use with young people and was found to predict substance abuse, compliance with safe sex practices, depression, violent crime and general physical malaise.

Hammond observed that anomie grows out of a social context in which there is:

• A breakdown in norms
• An absence of guiding principles
• A lack of constraint

He also observed that alienation grows out of a social context in which there is:

• A plethora of constraints
• A strong normative structure
• A clearly understood but arbitrary set of guiding principles

In correlating estrangement with the KAI, no significant relationship was observed (r = 0.03, N = 425). However, by taking the two distinct origins of estrangement (anomie and alienation) Hammond explored a non-linear relationship. He split his sample into Adaptors and Innovators by taking individuals above and below the median and produced correlations of –0.37 and 0.43 respectively. Significantly moderate correlations.

The findings indicate that being more adaptive as an individual is associated with being more prone to anomic tensions – because they find a shortage of cognitive structure that is consistent and manageable. Conversely, being more innovative is associated with being more prone to alienation – as they find highly detailed and demanding structure oppressive, and difficult to control.

To put it another way, more adaptive individuals (who prefer solving problems by use of rules) will struggle when there is too much change without consensual agreement to the guiding principles that a particular group is used to following; and more innovative individuals (who prefer altering rules to solve problems) will become frustrated when there is too much control and constraints restricting their autonomy. In these situations, individuals who sit at either end of the KAI continuum could become estranged if their workplace, social group, or family environment becomes distressed. If estrangement is the outcome, it may be the result of too much structure for the more innovative, and too little structure for the more adaptive.

All of this means that parents who are concerned about their adolescent offspring could use KAI to discover which problem-solving style their loved ones prefer, thereby helping them to understand more about their natural tendencies when it comes to fitting into the family group, peer groups, and other social structures. Similarly, employers can use KAI when work relationships have broken down, to understand whether the cause might be due to widely differing preferences of problem-solving along the adaption-innovation continuum.

Once people understand how differences in problem-solving styles can lead to frustration and estrangement from others it is likely that things can be done to prevent loneliness prevailing, or occurring in the future. Knowing one’s position on the KAI continuum can help understand why someone may have disengaged or become estranged from others so both those who have withdrawn and those who remain can modify their behavior to avoid the situation in the future.

Again, there are many reasons for estrangement. One reason, which is based in cognition, is to consider how one prefers to solve problems, adaptively or innovatively, given the amount of structure being imposed.