Be Territorial, Perform Badly? The Curvilinear Relation Between Territoriality and Task Performance

Abstract

Employees who engage in constructing territorial boundary may be isolated from outside and hinder social exchange, thus diminishing task performance. Whereas, the lack of sense of belongings and responsibility driven by too little employee territoriality may lead to poor performance. These potential adverse effects of too much or too little territoriality cast doubts on whether the influence of employee territoriality on task performance is linearly negative. Grounded in social exchange theory and resource allocation theory, this study proposed and tested the curvilinear relationship between employee territoriality and task performance, while also exploring the mediating role of help giving. We further proposed that employee territoriality would interact with perceived territorial climate to influence his/her help giving and task performance. Two studies were conducted to test these assumptions. In the first study with a sample of 507 employees and their corresponding leader, we found that employee territoriality exhibited an inverted U-shaped relationship with task performance, and this curvilinear relationship would be of greater magnitude situated in high perceptions of territorial climate. In the second study, we replicated and extended the results of the first study by analyzing 339 supervisor-subordinate dyads. The results revealed that employee territoriality negatively related to help giving, and further help giving had an inverted U-shaped relationship with task performance, thus demonstrating the mediating role of help giving in the curvilinear employee territoriality-task performance linkage. Moreover, this indirect curvilinear effect would be more negative at higher levels of perceived territorial climate.