Managers use employee guarding to maintain access to valued employees over whom they feel a sense of psychological ownership. Although research suggests that the practice is widely used, questions remain regarding the efficacy of these downward influence tactics, most notably including how subordinates respond to these influence attempts. In this investigation, we directly test how employee guarding affects turnover intentions, job embeddedness, performance, and voluntary turnover. In Study 1, a self-report subordinate perspective, we find that the persuasion form of guarding is positively related to turnover intentions, positively related to job embeddedness, and marginally and negatively related to job performance. The nurturing form of guarding is positively related to job embeddedness, negatively related to quit intentions, but was not significantly related to job performance. In Study 2, a global dyadic study of managers and randomly selected subordinates, persuasion and nurturing were positively related to subordinate performance, nurturing was negatively related to subordinate job embeddedness, positively related to quit intentions, and both persuasion and nurturing increased voluntary turnover risks. These results broadly offer caution against the use of employee guarding as a retention tactic, and we discuss theoretical and practical contributions.
