Abstract
While employee’s self-determination is enacted within a physical space, workplace space has been almost completely overlooked in research on self-determination theory. Our aims were to investigate how changes to workplace space threaten employees’ self-determination, and how employees’ subsequent resistance to spatial changes were motivated to reclaim self-determination. Our data comes from qualitative interviews with teachers and managers in two English schools that had experienced radical change to teachers’ workspaces. The findings reveal that changes to workplace space led to a contested terrain between managers and employees over the control of organizational space. Spatial changes were experienced by teachers as damaging their sense of self-determination. Teachers responded by reappropriating their new workplaces in efforts to reclaim self-determination. We contribute by introducing the importance of workplace space into self-determination theory and show that ‘where’ work is conducted and how that space is interpreted is an important part of employees’ self-determination.