Employee territoriality and job performance : a qualitative and quantitative investigation

Abstract

The construct of territoriality reflects an individual’s behavioral expression of his or her feelings of ownership toward a physical or social object. Existing research mainly focuses on how others evaluate the individuals who display territorial behaviors by labeling them as unapproachable, uncooperative, asocial, self-serving, and less of team players. However, less is known about how territorial employees view and evaluate themselves. The answer to this question can advance our knowledge to capture the consequences of engaging in territorial behavior for actors. Therefore, in this dissertation, I take an actor-centric perspective to explore whether employees may gain or suffer from territorial behaviors and what are their psychological experiences. A qualitative study based upon 32 semi-structured interviews was first conducted to capture employees’ accounts of how they felt, thought, and acted after exhibiting territorial behaviors. Followed by the grounded theory procedure, the interview transcripts were coped and abstracted to finally form a theoretical framework that uncovered favorable and adverse impacts of territorial behaviors. I then narrowed down the scope of this dissertation and centered on how employees appraised their territorial behaviors by interpreting the benefits or costs for personal self and social self, drawing on cognitive appraisal theory of emotion and self-concept theory. Specifically, I propose that independent self-construal stimulates the territorial employees to take attention to the increased control or mastery over possessed objects or resources within the territory, which can reduce uncertainty and largely lower the possibility of being infringed by others. In such contexts, employees are less likely to experience anxiety at work and can concentrate on tasks at hand and produce better performance. Meanwhile, interdependent self-construal motivates the employees to interpret their territorial behaviors as the threat to building harmonious relationships with their colleagues and the barrier to receiving feedback, help, or support, which is the primary stimulus for evoking state anxiety that may seriously deteriorate job performance. A quantitative study with multisource (i.e., 354 employees and their immediate leaders) and time-lagged data was used to empirically test the hypothesized model. By conducting multilevel path analysis, the double-edged sword effects of engaging in territorial behaviors on job performance are discovered. The results demonstrated that employee territoriality had positive impacts on personal control and interpersonal ostracism; personal control was negatively related to state anxiety whereas interpersonal ostracism was positively correlated with state anxiety; state anxiety, in turn, exerted negative influences on job performance. The positive impact of employee territoriality on personal control was stronger when an employee had a high rather than low level of independent self-construal. The positive influence of employee territoriality on interpersonal ostracism was stronger when an employee had a high rather than low level of interdependent self-construal. Also, data failed to support the serial mediation effects of employee territoriality on job performance through personal control and state anxiety; but the negative relations between employee territoriality and job performance were sequentially mediated by interpersonal ostracism and state anxiety. These research findings have significant implications for both theory and practice.