Abstract
Despite being a novel and useful construct, perhaps prophetically, territoriality has defended itself from adoption by the management research community. However, the topic itself is not to blame and looking back 20 years after publishing the first management article on territoriality, I realize that certain choices I made influenced the direction and impact of my initial publication. In this article, I reflect on my experience trying to launch a new topic (territoriality) into the management field. From this experience, I offer readers ideas that may help successfully launch new constructs. Failure to join other conversations, develop a measure that could be easily adopted by others, and key early tradeoffs I made played a key role in my own failed (slow) launch.
Territoriality as a construct describes one's exclusive ownership (mine and not yours) of an object (physical, social, idea, etc …) including the efforts made to communicate the claim to and, where necessary, defend the claim from others. Territoriality is evident in all animals and studied in almost every discipline including zoology, geography, political science, anthropology, psychology, sociology, so when I joined a business school as a PhD student I was surprised to learn that research on territoriality was absent in the management literature. Drawing on research from these aforementioned fields, I explored territoriality in organizations as part of my dissertation and submitted a theory piece to the Academy of Management Review. When I received the acceptance letter in 2005 I imagined that an exciting journey was launching but to my disappointment research on territoriality in organizations has not had the impact I expected. 1
Looking back almost 20 years later, it is not as if territoriality is completely unknown. We know that territoriality affects relationships between coworkers (e.g., trust; Brown et al., 2014a) and negatively impacts performance (Brown & Zhu, 2016; Singh, 2019). Each year there are about 70 studies exploring new relationships (e.g., organizational change; Kromah et al., 2024); further refining the territoriality concept (e.g., territorial expanding as a new type of territorial behavior; Chen et al., 2023); and expanding the types of objects that people are territorial (e.g., Gardner et al. (2018) showed that managers are territorial over their employees). However, compared to some of the other papers in this special collection, territoriality is not widely studied by management researchers as indicated both by citation counts and by a lack of adoption and integration into PhD OB seminars. Nearly 20 years after its acceptance, I can conclude that the impact of my original article is understated, or at least not commensurate with the importance of the construct. I am not alone in this thinking as Sandra Robinson, one of the original paper's coauthors, mused with some surprise in an autobiographical account, “Tales from a late bloomer” (2021), that territoriality had still not taken off. I wonder if it is so accepted as part of life that we don’t find it interesting and take it for granted. Yet territoriality is clearly important to people who work in organizations. Reacting to a colleague fixing the photocopier or borrowing a stapler may seem amusing but these infringements and acts of territorial behavior are serious for those involved. So why do more researchers not pay attention to territoriality as a topic of study? My coauthors, Tom Lawrence and Sandra Robinson, are renowned for publishing high-impact work and AMR is a high-profile journal with a wide readership so what did I do wrong? Why has territoriality failed to launch?
I don’t think I am alone in seeing one's work lag and wonder why. Even award-winning articles that would seem to get a lot of exposure can get overlooked. For example, papers like “Systems of exchange” by Biggart and Delbridge (2004) and “Both market and hierarchy: An incentive-system theory of hybrid governance forms” by Makadok and Coff (2009) won the respective best annual paper in AMR but have fewer than 300 citations each. While I cannot know for certain what happened on the journey for each of those articles, this revisionist history special collection in the Journal of Management Inquiry is the perfect opportunity to reflect on why my article on territoriality did not take off the way I envisioned. From this reflection, I offer three lessons that may be useful to others as they consider proposing or reintroducing concepts to a field.
Join a Conversation
I have found that many researchers are sometimes afraid to share their work—perhaps a territorial defense until they have fully marked the idea space as theirs? This wasn’t me—or at least it only partially applied to me. I shared my idea and I wanted people to join
Importantly, joining more conversations also helps in the review process. While novelty has benefits in publishing, until a concept has a community there are some significant challenges. For example, who are the reviewers? Most likely, the reviewers will not be familiar with your work and while they may find it interesting they may not understand the nuances of your construct—I spent a lot of time in my papers having to explain what territoriality was (and was not). By joining a conversation the core concepts are understood and the addition of a new idea is exciting, especially if, as in our case, it is impactful.
Talk is Cheap—Measurement is Key
We all know the axiom, “that which gets measured gets done”. I learned this the hard way. For a variety of reasons, I was late to publish a measure of territoriality. I lost the momentum to help drive research. Indeed, looking at other seminal works, including those in this special collection, a measure is critical. It wasn’t unit 2009 that I managed to publish an empirical article with a measure of territoriality and it wasn’t until 2011 before Sandra and I published an empirical paper in a mainstream management journal, Organization Science (Brown & Robinson, 2011). I believe this lack of empirical study muted the attention. Without an instrument, there was no guidance on how to measure territoriality and the theory necessarily stayed untested. A measure also provides a tool to connect with others and have conversations. Thus, even if other researchers saw potential connections to their own constructs there was no way for them to easily test the connection. The timeline of citations seems to fit this. Until 2013 the maximum citations in one year was 23. Since then the average number of citations has tripled. Taking this further, I believe a quantitative measure is critical. Qualitative research helps build and test theory but a scale allows a construct to get more easily incorporated into others work. For example, Molinsky and Margolis published their work on “Necessary evils and interpersonal sensitivity in organizations” in AMR in 2005 and won the best paper award for their subsequent paper in AMJ (Margolis & Molinsky, 2008; Molinsky & Margolis, 2005). The work is fantastic but the empirical paper was based on interviews and doesn’t immediately lend itself to be incorporated into other research unlike Bennett and Robinson's (2000) work on deviance, which developed measures that helped the ideas become widely adopted. To compare, as of March 2024, Margolis and Molinsky (2008) paper has 234 citations in Google scholar but the Bennett and Robinson (2000) paper has over 4,650 citations in Google scholar.
Be Careful What You Sacrifice
While the lack of community and lack of measures are direct impacts on the slow launch of territoriality, I think a third consideration is the indirect effect of choices I made during the review process. In many review processes authors make tradeoffs to get their work published. I was fortunate to have a great review team led by Art Brief but as a doctoral student, I was also too eager to accept the suggestions in my effort to get a paper published. I began working on the idea in the Fall of 2000 but within a year a paper on psychological ownership (Pierce et al., 2001) was published and I got scared that my idea was going to be irrelevant. Coming from an environmental psychology background I had never heard of psychological ownership and suddenly my paper switched from a broad and expansive investigation of territoriality and its origins to using psychological ownership as the departure point and explaining how territoriality was different from and extended psychological ownership. This shaped the narrative in a meaningful way. On the positive side, and reinforcing my first comment, joining a conversation on psychological ownership allowed me to build on something that was already known and this undoubtedly helped get my paper published. However, I limited my paper to territorial behaviors, making the focus and application very narrow. I also minimized some of the ways that territoriality was different from psychological ownership including the focus on exclusivity. As I outline below, this reinforced a specific focus of territoriality as a negative construct that fit the popular press narrative (e.g., “Silos, Politics and Turf Wars” (Lencioni, 2006); Territorial Games (Simmons, 2003), but which I don’t think is correct.
A Relaunch of Territoriality
Despite its failed (slow?) launch, I still believe that territoriality is underexplored and has much to contribute to our understanding of organizational behavior. In this next section, using the themes above, I explore how I could have launched more effectively the first time, underpinning a strategy to relaunch territoriality now.
First, one of the initial conversations I missed that would have brought more attention to territoriality was organizational commitment. This was a particular oversight on my part when I look back and realize I could have drawn on my own research as a masters student in an urban studies program. Territoriality was an important part of American urban revitalization strategies in the late 1990s whereby governments would try to revitalize an area through creating home ownership. My research involved walking around different neighborhoods measuring territorial displays and surveying residents. My observations corroborated my interviews, reinforcing that house decorations and maintenance of the house signaled commitment to the neighborhood and inspired/ encouraged other residents to take care of their properties (Brown et al., 2004). The findings showed that resident territoriality facilitates neighborhood revitalization because it fosters a sense of place and pride that people feel in their homes. Moreover, neighborhoods with high levels of territoriality (evidence of claims) discouraged littering, violence, and graffiti. Territorial markers also encouraged interaction among neighbors and increased neighborhood cohesion (Brown et al., 2004). Based on this I should have connected this work to organizational commitment. Would employee territorial displays foster organizational commitment and send similar signals of commitment to their coworkers? Supporting this connection, there is some evidence that personal displays may have similar effects on creating cohesion among office workers (Byron & Laurence, 2015; Elsbach, 2004).
Another promising conversation that I overlooked initially was with knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding (e.g., Cabrera, & Cabrera, 2002). This was an emerging concept at the same time that I was researching territoriality so perhaps it was not yet established in its own right. However, knowledge hiding and knowledge sharing have since been recognized as important concepts in organizations and connecting territoriality as one of the reason why people do not share knowledge would have highlighted the value of territoriality. Fortunately, recent research is starting to show that territoriality may be a barrier to knowledge sharing and a predictor of knowledge hiding (e.g., Singh, 2019) and that territorial feelings may increase hiding and negatively affect performance (Guo et al., 2022; Hernaus et al., 2024).
As I noted earlier, a measure is critical to successfully launch a new concept. Unfortunately, I think I developed the wrong “first” measure. When researchers look to study a new construct they will naturally try to use the existing measures but the measure I developed did not lend itself to be easily adopted by others. The measure is somewhat cumbersome—including the full 23-item scale (Brown, 2009) adds significant length to a survey. Moreover, the measure was developed using territoriality over physical items and some items do not match well to nonphysical objects. This limited the generalizability and required further modification of the measure. In contrast, the most commonly used measure of psychological ownership is only 4 items (Van Dyne and Pierce (2004) proposed 7 items but these have been further reduced to 4 items as the most commonly used scale (e.g., Brown et al., 2014a, 2014b)) and can be easily modified without changing the meaning to study a wide range of objects. In hindsight I wish I had developed a more holistic measure that captured feelings of exclusivity and that could be more easily incorporated by researchers into their work. Items such as “this [object] is for my exclusive use,” “I do not think others should use this [object],” and “I feel upset when people use [object]” would capture aspects of territoriality that are not measured by feelings of ownership or other constructs. Again, I think I overlooked an important aspect of research, which is to contribute to and facilitate further research. Generating a shorter and overall assessment would be more easily adopted to other contexts and allow researchers to include feelings of territoriality into more research and test possible relationships.
Finally, in terms of revisiting the consequences of choices I made originally, I think one of the ideas that got missed early was exploring the benefits of being territorial and having a territory. In the review process, positioning territoriality as a negative outcome of psychological ownership (at the time psychological ownership was seen as a positive outcome and something to be encouraged) helped situate territoriality and get the paper published. This choice created a narrative of territoriality as dysfunctional behavior and something to be avoided. As a result, subsequent research has been one-sided and focused on the dark side of territoriality. This perspective is not wrong—there are fascinating negatives from territoriality but as someone who had seen the benefits of territoriality in my earlier research I wish I had created a more balanced view that also drew more attention to the benefits of being territorial. The impact of this choice is not inconsequential. I looked at the territoriality publications in the FT50 journals since 2005 and all of these focused on the negative side of territoriality. I have been guilty of this myself and only this year published an article that highlighted the positive side of territoriality showing that territorial expanding increases information sharing (Chen et al., 2023). Unfortunately focusing on the negative overlooks actual benefits to the person engaging in the behavior and minimizes why people do this (and why it is so important to them). There is extensive research in other disciplines that highlights the positive (essential) aspects of territoriality and these benefits could offer important insight into other areas. For example, territorial behavior may provide a sense of security that allows people to be more creative. Communicating boundaries may help reduce conflict between employees and allow employees to focus on their work as they feel an increased sense of security over their valued territories. Arguing more strongly for the positive sides of territoriality in my original publication and early work would also have expanded the range of outcomes and probably increased the adoption of territoriality more broadly.
Conclusion
Looking back at what has come to pass, the current state of things, and what has still not happened through a revisionist lens has been useful. When I was approached about doing this paper I was surprised because one of the editors believed my topic to be mainstream and important but I did not. I shared how I was frustrated that I had failed to get my topic out there in the way I had hoped. However, I had not actually thought about the path I took and the choices I made. It is easy to get caught up in new projects or teaching or service but I wish I had done this revisionist history earlier as I may have seen ways to pivot. Reflection is critical to check our beliefs. We make a lot of assumptions about our work, including that if it gets published everyone sees it. I am not sure if this differs by stage of career but I think I was naive that my work would be found. I did not promote my research—I assumed others would be as excited about territoriality as me. Being reflective early would have helped me realize that the impact I was hoping to have was limited and that my ideas were not being heard by a large audience. So, I encourage all researchers, even early-stage scholars, to look at their work and make sure important pieces are not being omitted. If they are, it is never too late to start again.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
