Belonging has become a central objective of contemporary inclusion efforts, yet membership, acceptance, and interpersonal recognition do not necessarily provide employees with consequential influence over organizational decisions. This Original Conceptual Framework Article develops a proposed Belonging–Power Framework to distinguish four analytically separate conditions: belonging and legitimate membership, voice access, influence conversion, and organizational power or resource authority. The framework integrates evidence on inclusion, employee voice, hierarchy, endorsement, implementation, structural inequality, and policy–practice decoupling while preserving distinctions between individual experience and organizational structure. It proposes that inclusion can become substantively incomplete when employees are welcomed or heard but remain unable to affect recurring decisions, resource allocations, or rules that shape their work. Three conversion problems are emphasized: belonging without usable voice, voice without consequential uptake, and episodic influence without durable authority. Structural barriers and dependency on gatekeepers are treated as cross-cutting conditions rather than assumed universal mechanisms. The article further proposes diagnostic dimensions for separating sentiment, access, response, implementation, and authority, while rejecting unvalidated thresholds or readiness scores. The framework is intended to organize testable propositions and comparative research, not to establish a causal sequence or prescribe equal authority across all decisions. Its contribution is a bounded conceptual architecture for examining when inclusion reflects meaningful participation and when apparently inclusive membership remains dependent, symbolic, or structurally constrained.
