Antecedents and consequences of collective psychological ownership

Abstract

The popular and business press has long hailed employee’s “owning” their projects as a key to motivation (e.g., Bullock, 2014), but only in the last twenty years has the phenomenon been more rigorously examined by organizational scholars. Although such work has tended to study ownership feelings at the individual level, recent conceptual work has begun to investigate the importance of feelings of “us” and “ours” with respect to teams and their work output. In their seminal work, Pierce and Jussila (2010) defined Collective Psychological Ownership as a feeling of collective possessiveness and attachment to organizational objects, that can be measured at the individual or group level. In this research, we use several methodologies and three different samples to test the conceptual structure and construct validity of three drivers of CPO proposed by Pierce and Jussila (2010): the extent that the team members have all invested, controlled, and come to know intimately a specific team work product. Results support a three-factor structure (Study 1). Additionally, CPO mediates the relationship between investment, intimate knowledge and positive team outcomes, such as perceptions of effectiveness regarding the team and quit intentions, as well as championing intentions regarding the shared work product (Study 2).