Claiming a Corner at Work: Measuring Employee Territoriality to Their Workspaces

Critical Analysis

In the context of a workspace, employees often mark and defend territory. This territory is typically considered physical space, but also may include objects, artifacts, and ideas. Territorial behaviors are communal, rather than personal: they “are not simply about expressing ownership over an object (e.g., this is mine), but are centrally concerned with establishing, communicating, and maintaining one’s relationship with that object relative to others in the social environment (e.g., this is mine and not yours!). Territorial behavior is not necessarily negative, as it “may engender a sense of belonging to social groups” by delineating space relative to others, acknowledging the others and establishing a sense of participation.

Often, territoriality is about privacy regulation. Regulation may be pushed down through an organizational hierarchy, but is more likely established bottom-up by employees themselves. They may mark organizational “objects” (such as space) with symbols, which helps them organize their environment; even while not explicitly establishing privacy, this marking serves to “fulfill the need to have a sense of place.”

People new to a space may not understand or correctly interpret territorial signals, or may even purposefully disregard them. This is infringement, and when infringed upon, someone may proactively or reactively manage the impact on territory (threat of loss, or actual loss of space.) While this appears similar to a display of power, it’s more precisely a way to influence others and to establish and retain a sense of control through privacy.

The negotiation of territory extends beyond a workplace. Vinsel, Brown, Altman and Foss describe that students who had more control over privacy were less likely to drop out of university, indicating that the public creativity of a design studio potentially has negative implications on student performance, if not addressed through other mechanisms. Some schools offer dedicated per-student space, and most studios have shared space, but often with little administratively defined boundaries. The value of public designing and learning—impromptu critique, peripheral participation, comparison—may be at odds with the value of feeling “in control.” And as a student can experience infringement over ideas themselves, design studio pedagogy needs to proactively establish a sense of ownership-free idea generation, something likely at odds with creative identity development.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Links territory with privacy and identity, and privacy (and identity) with educational persistence and health
• Presents dedicated studio territory as a form of regulation