The Dysfunction of Territoriality in Organizations

Critical Analysis

In this text, the authors identifies the main issues with territoriality, and the associated problems with eliminating privacy and ownership in an organization. They conclude that territoriality should not be eliminated; it should be recognized and then managed appropriately.

The author introduces territoriality as an emotional sense of ownership, and the associated behaviors used to mark and defend that ownership. This is, generally, less about feelings of value and more about considerations of basic human needs and a way to function in groups. Territoriality isn’t limited to space; “individuals and groups can experience territorial feelings and behavior over all aspects of organizational life, such as roles, tasks, relationships, ideas, products, and even time.” Territoriality is an expression of ownership, and is often signaled and defended. A sense of ownership fulfills basic needs. It is irrational, and should be treated less as a carefully managed activity and more as a naturally occurring psychological phenomenon.

In an organization, people who generate ideas and knowledge have a clear sense of ownership over these creations; “products of the mind or group activity are intimately known to the creators, and their source is clear.” This means that the strength of ownership, given its lack of ambiguity, is high and full of tension. People may hide these types of creations, and a “resistance to sharing may be stronger when one feels others are demanding it.” Feelings of territoriality are related to the creative efforts involved in generating a new idea, and “to the extent that we are more tied to our own ideas and creations, we are less willing to take on and endorse other’s ideas, even if they may be superior.”

Territory is controlled. Members of an organization go out of their way to delineate what they consider is theirs. Examples of this include “putting pictures of one’s family on their desk” or purposefully decorating or modifying something to show their identity; “identity-oriented marking serves the function of enabling individuals to construct and express their identities to themselves and to others through the ownership of things at work.” Providing access to lockers and other individual spaces allows for positive delineation, as does “giving individuals opportunities to personalize their work spaces, computers and such.”

The delineation of space “create areas that employees do not enter, groups they will not seek to join, or projects they will not go near, all out of respect for unspoken but assumed territorial boundaries upon which they do not want to infringe.” Parts of organizations become exclusive based on intellectual contributions and associated feelings of ownership over those ideas. Boundary marking becomes a way to regulate access.

The authors argue that territorial marking is related to conflict. The “subjective, socially constructed nature of territories means inadvertent infringements can occur.” What is at stake is considered of high value, and an infringement can “lead to feelings of frustration, fear, and even grief for the loss of control of one’s possession.” A shift to an open floor plan has been shown to decrease satisfaction and motivation: it is a loss of place, and “loss of place means a potential loss of identity, of something one has invested in, and a venue for self-expression.”

Instead of working to remove individual territory, organizations should “put more emphasis on the development of group territories.” They should work to foster a strong sense of belonging in the entire organization, and “perhaps the most important thing that management can do to shift the culture in the right direction is by modeling the sharing of resources… rather than emphasize their own territorial claim… they can lower such boundaries and instead model more open sharing of organization resources.”

Research Value

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

• Supports an argument of exclusive ownership over deviance in a corporate context, as other groups back off and let designers have control of that “space of ideas”
• Indicates the tension present in a studio, where students may or may not have privacy, but are continually encouraged to remove boundaries of ownership
• Explains the relationship between identity with a work product, and defensiveness around critique