Best Practices and Industry Benchmarks

Sustainability has become a hot topic in current society and has attracted increasing attention. In the field of sustainable human resource management, how to continuously stimulate employees' high performance, aiming to achieve the sustainable development of organizations has become an important research topic. Based on the understanding of the Pygmalion effect, a common measure for managers is to continuously express high performance expectations to their subordinates in order to achieve an upward spiraling cycle of high performance through sustainable motivation. However, this study finds that high performance expectations may have a double-edged sword effect through an employee's psychological mechanisms while promoting employee's high performance. Unfortunately, broadly speaking, scholars have not been concerned.

Based on COR theory, we comprehensively derived a possible conceptual model that specified the relationship between high performance expectations and territoriality. By identifying an important mechanism of territoriality, we conducted an empirical study grounded in COR theory. We further explored the mediating role of stress on the high performance expectations–territoriality relationship and the moderating role of task autonomy for influencing this mediation. Based on a sample of 291 matches, the results revealed that the effect of high performance expectations on territoriality through stress was conditioned on task autonomy, lending support for all of the proposed hypotheses. Specifically, high task autonomy strengthened the negative effect of stress on territoriality, which further magnified the influence of high performance expectations.

These results suggest that high performance expectations from supervisors are positively related to employees' general stress levels. These findings are consistent with the research of Diebig et al. of the relation between high performance expectations and stress. As they claimed, the high performance expectations from their leaders might lead them to a feeling of uncomfortableness and create a mental overload. Our study confirms this effect and promotes the further understanding of the relationship, and clarifies the negative psychological mechanism that high performance expectations may bring to subordinates as a whole. Our research also responds to the call for more attention to the psychological mechanisms in relation to the sustainable human resource management field.

In addition, we find that stress plays a mediating part in the relation between high performance expectations and territoriality. The previously mentioned negative effect will inversely undermine the motivation and performance through employees' bad psychological mood and distraction. This may be one of the important ways that high performance expectations fail to generate sustainable incentives, which is consistent with the study of Dai et al., supporting and verifying the existence of negative effects of high performance expectations. Similarly, our results confirmed the antecedent of territoriality from the perspective of resources. It is in line with the essence of territoriality proposed by Brown et al., namely that territoriality is concerned with the control of organizational resources.

Finally, the indirect effects of high performance expectations on territoriality via stress were stronger when job autonomy was high. Our study's result was inconsistent with the prior research findings about job autonomy. Our research confirms that job autonomy acts as a catalyst in the stress to outcome mechanism, and we suggest that more in-depth research is required.

Theoretical Implications

Our research provides a number of theoretical implications. First, our findings enrich the application of COR theory to the territoriality literature. Territoriality is essentially the protection of all tangible or intangible resources. Accordingly, COR theory can well explain the relevant research on territoriality. Past research has mainly focused on the regulatory focus theory or psychological ownership theory. We took a new perspective on resources to explore territoriality.

Second, our work contributes to the territoriality literature by examining stress as a mechanism of territoriality. Past work has mostly addressed the outcome variables of territoriality. It has shed light on the harmful consequences of territoriality, but has paid relatively little attention to the factors that predict how territoriality is likely to occur. To some extent, the sources of territoriality have been relatively neglected. Our results enrich the exploration of the antecedent variables of territoriality by opening the black box between high performance expectations and territoriality. Therefore, this study has responded to authors' calls and filled the empirical void. In addition, past studies examining the antecedents of territoriality have mainly focused on individuals' perceptions of themselves, their peers, and their subordinates. Our research has shifted the focus to the behaviors of the supervisors. This approach may provide a new perspective to answer the question: What triggers territoriality?

Third, this study explored the negative effect of high performance expectations, which the previous literature has largely ignored. Prior findings have revealed that high performance expectations have been negatively associated with employees' persistence in the face of adversity and stress. Our study successfully combined high performance expectations and territoriality to further uncover the downside of high performance expectations. Hence, it supplements other studies conducted by scholars like Chen and Liang on high performance expectations.

Finally, with task autonomy as the moderator variable, we verified the strengthened effect of task autonomy on the negative outcomes induced by stress, namely strengthening territoriality. This is inconsistent with prior research findings on the positive effects of task autonomy, such as higher satisfaction, motivation, and performance. Hence, our findings show that task autonomy, as a moderator, plays an important role in organizational behavior research. Moreover, our findings have expanded the research on individual territoriality and how it is moderated by contextual variables such as trust in the work environment. This further verifies the types of territoriality that can be affected and moderated.

Practical Implications

Overall, our findings provide insights into organizational management and human resource practices. First, they provide a new direction for reducing the negative effect induced by territoriality. At present, teamwork has become the mainstream of work design. Effective teamwork contributes to knowledge sharing and innovation. However, some literature has shown that territoriality may impede interpersonal communications and knowledge sharing between employees, negatively affecting team performance. As we mentioned above, stress has a direct effect on territoriality, thus, it is necessary to decrease the stress to control territoriality. We all know that the sources of stress at work are varied. Hence, there are many ways to reduce stress such as providing organizational support, supervisor support, and so on. Especially, managers should pay more attention to the stress caused by performance. In some ways, stress caused by performance has a more significant impact on individuals and organizations because performance is the core concern of employees.

Second, we shed light on the importance of managing supervisor's sustainable performance expectations. Our results indicate that high performance expectations negatively influence territoriality through stress, whereas task autonomy moderates the positive relationship between stress and territoriality. We encourage managers to recognize that high performance expectations have a negative effect. This would remind them to pay attention to a reasonably set range when setting high performance expectations to reduce its negative impact instead of promoting blind, unsustainable expectations.

Finally, our findings underscore that task autonomy influences subordinates. Managers already know that task autonomy can bring higher motivation, satisfaction, and performance. Further, research on job crafting encourages managers to craft more autonomy for employees. This would make them feel more responsible for their performance and be motivated to devote more effort to the task. However, our findings suggest that it is necessary to consider the negative effect of some work characteristics such as task autonomy. For work with high task autonomy (e.g., innovative scientific research), the sharing intention of jobholders is of a low level. Hence, when employees are assigned jobs with high-level task autonomy, it reminds managers to control the employees' stress at a reasonable level to decrease the possible negative impact. Similarly, if the stress level is high, managers should control the level of task autonomy.

Limitation and Future Study

Territoriality is gradually becoming a new hot spot in the organizational behavior field. In fact, there are several limitations in this study that must be addressed in future research. First, the cross-sectional design used in the data collection of this study made it impossible to infer causality between the variables in our model. To be specific, we measured all variables at a time point. Although the cross-sectional design did not impair the associations that existed in the model and its usefulness for generating hypotheses for future research, we encourage researchers to overcome the limitations mentioned above by adopting longitudinal cross-lagged studies of the variables to further verify the validity from dynamic data.

Second, employees' territoriality is presented at the team and organizational levels. The majority of current scholars have carried out individual-level research on territoriality, and this study was also conducted at the individual level. Only a few studies have explored territoriality at the team level. For example, Liu, Chen, Xiao, and Zhou studied internal and external territorial behavior from the perspective of teams. Therefore, it is necessary for future researchers to expand from the individual level to the team organization level.

Finally, this study used data collected from two companies with the two occupational attributes. It is feasible that occupational characteristics may have affected our findings. Attributes characterized by occupation, such as salespersons, are more concerned with protecting their sales territory. Accordingly, the relational model we build might be more prominent among such teams. When generalizing our findings to other occupational backgrounds in future research, caution is recommended.