Best Practices and Industry Benchmarks

In the sustainable human resource management area, it is commonly thought that organizations need to rely upon their employees to form long-term competitive advantage and sustainable performance. Accordingly, it has been the common practice for managers who believe in the Pygmalion effect to motivate employees through implementing sustainable high performance expectations in management practice. High performance expectations are behavior that demonstrates the supervisors' expectations for quality, excellence, and/or high performance on the part of followers. Due to the universal phenomenon of high performance expectations, it is of vital importance to determine whether it is really effective, and more specifically, to clarify what kind of psychological mechanism employees will stimulate when they face the high performance requirement, making it a considerable topic for research.

Although prior research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that managers can motivate employees by implementing high performance expectations, promoting them to internalize external expectations into their own expectations to improve their performance. However, the fact that can not be ignored is that people with high performance expectations do not always show performance improvement, and excessive expectations may lead to insomnia or even withdrawal behavior. This indicates that extant literature may have overlooked the negative effects of high performance expectations. The absence of studies linking high performance expectations to negative impacts represents an important research opportunity with both theoretical and practical implications.

We developed a conceptual model to examine the relationship between high performance expectations and the employees' territoriality by integrating the conservation of resources theory (COR theory) and the job demands–resources model (JD-R model). Territoriality refers to an individual's behavioral expression of his or her feelings of ownership toward a physical or social object in organizations. From the perspective of resources, territoriality is concerned with the control of organizational resources and it aims to protect owned resources. It is worth studying territoriality further based on COR theory. High performance expectations imply that more resources should be invested and acquired. As the COR theory points out, when an individuals' central or key resources are threatened with investment or acquisition, the individual's stress will rise. Hence, we predict that employees who have high performance expectations imposed on them may be more likely to be stressed.

According to the conservation of resources theory, it is reasonable to speculate that employees tend to protect their own resources whenever they perceive stress. The principle of the conservation of resources theory indicates that resource loss is disproportionately more salient than resource gain. Hence, the individual's consciousness of protecting their own resources is stronger than that of acquiring surplus resources. The protection of resources can be well represented by territoriality. Therefore, we predict that stress may have an influence on territoriality.

We also studied the moderating effect of task autonomy as a job characteristic in the model. According to the JD-R model, task autonomy as a job characteristic can be considered a job resource that functions to achieve work goals and reduce job demands together with the associated physiological and psychological costs. This indicates that task autonomy can affect employees from the perspective of resources. As such, the purpose of this research is to investigate stress induced by high performance expectations as the antecedent of territoriality, and identify the conditions under which a stressed employee might enhance his or her territoriality. We integrated the constructs above by expecting the relationship between high performance expectations and employee's territoriality, and by examining the mediating role of the employees' stress and the moderating role of the employee's task autonomy.

To answer the above questions, we conducted a field survey consisting of 80 sales teams and 291 samples from two high-tech companies headquartered in Shanghai, China. This study is composed of six parts. The second part introduces the theoretical background and hypothesis development. Parts three and four define the methodology and present the results. The fifth part discusses the findings, limitations, and future research directions and the sixth part concludes the paper.