Keep Off My Turf! Low-Status Managers’ Territoriality as a Response to Employees’ Novel Ideas

Abstract

Although employees come up with creative (i.e., novel and useful) ideas, many of those ideas are not endorsed or implemented by managers. In shedding light on this phenomenon, we propose that managers who have lower social status in the organization are more likely to reject employees’ novel (but still useful) ideas. Guided by associative-propositional evaluation theory (AP-E) and the literature on the psychology of having low status, we hypothesize that when employees propose novel (compared with more mundane) ideas, it triggers greater feelings of insecurity and threat in low-status (versus high-status) managers, who perceive that these employees, if successful, could potentially infringe on their own domains at work. In turn, such low-status managers feel the need to be territorial—that is, to maintain and protect their existing work domains from potential infringement by others—and therefore refrain from endorsing their employees’ novel, yet useful ideas. However, we suggest that such negative effects are attenuated when low-status managers have high levels of organizational identification, allowing them to subordinate their self-interest to the interests of the broader organization. We demonstrate these effects in four preregistered studies—three laboratory experiments and a field study (with real employee ideas provided to managers for their assessment). We discuss the implications for the literature on the receiving side of creativity, territoriality, and status in organizations. Funding: This research was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72002214, 72372151 and 72302122] and Humanities and Social Sciences Research of Ministry of Education of China [Grant 22YJC630105]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15132 .