Antecedents and consequences of collective psychological ownership: The validation of a conceptual model

Abstract

The popular and business press has long hailed employees “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 (CPO) as a feeling of collective possessiveness and attachment to organizational objects, such as work products. CPO has been theoretically linked to important team outcomes; and three drivers of CPO have been proposed but not empirically tested. In two studies, we test several of these relationships. In Study 1, we use several methodologies and two samples to test the conceptual structure and construct validity of drivers of CPO proposed by Pierce and Jussila (2010): investment, control and intimate knowledge. In Study 2, we examine the relationship between these three drivers of CPO, CPO itself, and several positive team outcomes, including perceptions of team effectiveness, quit intentions, and intentions to champion the shared work product.