(Designated AOM Best Paper) Coping with Territoriality in Organizational Change: The Role of Felt Responsibility for Change

Extant research on organizational change primarily emphasizes the influence of leaders on employees during change processes, while largely overlooking the impact employees can have on leaders. Addressing this gap, the present study adopts a leader-centric perspective to examine how employee job territoriality affects leaders’ sleep quality and subsequent change management behaviors. Drawing on the Job Demands-Resources model, we propose that employee job territoriality increases leaders’ insomnia, which impairs their within-team behaviors (e.g., visionary leadership) and intergroup behaviors (e.g., system responsiveness). Furthermore, we identify felt responsibility for constructive change (FRCC) as a critical moderator in this process. Specifically, leaders with stronger FRCC are more susceptible to insomnia when confronted with employee job territoriality and are more likely to exhibit reduced visionary leadership and system responsiveness as a consequence of insomnia. Using multi-wave, multi-source data collected from an organization undergoing its initial stage of change, we found that FRCC amplifies the negative effects of employee job territoriality on leader insomnia and strengthens the adverse impact of leader insomnia on both visionary leadership and system responsiveness. These findings offer important theoretical contributions to the literatures on territoriality, FRCC, and organizational change.