Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between job- and organization-based psychological ownership. In addition, the authors explored the emergence and outcomes of psychological ownership in Chinese context.

Time-lagged survey data from 158 Chinese participants were used to test several hypothesized relationships employing partial least square techniques.

Job-based psychological ownership appeared to mediate the relationship between experienced job control and organization-based psychological ownership. In addition, a statistically significant relationship between job-based psychological ownership and job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behaviors and turnover intentions, and a statistically significant relationship between organization-based psychological ownership and job satisfaction were observed. A negative relationship between organization-based psychological ownership and knowledge withholding was also observed.

Managers who want to enhance employees’ job- and ultimately organization-based psychological ownership should empower their employees by enabling them to exert control over their work.

This paper examined how organization-based psychological ownership emerges from control over work via job-based psychological ownership. The authors also investigated the impact of psychological ownership in Chinese context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine why and when employees hide knowledge. Individuals may tend to hide knowledge when they have strong psychological ownership feelings over knowledge. Therefore, this research builds and tests a theoretical model linking knowledge‐based psychological ownership with knowledge hiding via territoriality.

Data were collected from knowledge workers in China via a three‐wave web‐based survey. The final sample was 190 cases. Hierarchical regression models and a bootstrapping approach were used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that knowledge‐based psychological ownership positively affects knowledge hiding. Territoriality fully mediates the link between knowledge‐based psychological ownership and knowledge hiding. Moreover, organization‐based psychological ownership moderates the positive link between territoriality and knowledge hiding. Specifically, territoriality will mediate the indirect effect of knowledge‐based psychological ownership on knowledge hiding when organization‐based psychological ownership is low, but not when it is high.

The research reflects that to reduce knowledge hiding, organizations should focus on practices that can decrease employees' self‐perception of possession of knowledge and territoriality and that can strengthen employees' psychological ownership for organizations.

Although many actions have been adopted to foster knowledge management in companies, knowledge hiding is still prevalent in work settings. This paper highlights the predictive power of knowledge‐based psychological ownership on knowledge hiding, and the mediating role of territoriality in the link between knowledge‐based psychological ownership and knowledge hiding.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interrelationship between authentic leadership and followers’ feelings of organization-based psychological ownership.

This paper uses structural equation modelling to analyze cross-sectional data from almost 200 professionals working in managerial roles in India. It distinguishes between preventive and promotive psychological ownership and investigates the effects of four components of authentic leadership on each.

What makes people feel attached to an organization? To feel they “belong” and have a personal stake in its performance and future progress? Is it something about the place they go, the work they do or what the organization achieves? Or perhaps, it reflects their feelings about the people they work with – particularly about the person they work for. Authentic leaders certainly have an impact on their followers – so if individuals see their boss as an authentic leader, does it affect their feelings of psychological ownership towards the organization they work for?

This paper shows that authentic leadership – particularly perceptions of the leader’s moral perspective and capacity for balanced processing – has a marked effect on employees’ sense of organization-based promotive psychological ownership.

This paper draws attention to the implications for organizations when followers become unduly dependent on an authentic leader.

This paper questions whether territoriality should be considered as a part of psychological ownership or as an entirely separate construct.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of organizational psychological ownership (OPO) and organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) on positive organizational behaviors (POBs).

Based on empirical survey, 2,566 employees from 45 production enterprises in China were surveyed by a self-designed questionnaire on OPO, OBSE and POB. Then, the methods of correlation analysis, multiple regressions, impact effect and path analysis were used to verify the research hypothesis.

The results showed that POB is positively related to OPO and OBSE, and that OPO and OBSE are positive predictors of POBs. The results also demonstrated that OBSE has partial mediating effects on OPO and POB. In particular, psychological ownership has a significant impact on each sub-factor of POB, while OBSE has a remarkable effect on the behavior of devotion and interpersonal harmony.

This is a non-experimental field study and as such inferences about causality are limited, and there is a possibility that the results may be influenced by common method variance.

The findings of the present study reveal that to strengthen employees’ POBs, manager should enhance employees’ OPO and OBSE, and therefore the organizational performance and the individual efficacy will be improved.

This is the first research which studies the relationship among OPO, POB and OBSE under the background of China.

Social comparison and job-based psychological ownership (JPO) are compared and contrasted as explanations for relationships between organization relational psychological contract fulfillment (ORPCF) and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs).

Survey data were collected from 241 employees and 82 of their managers at an information services company. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling to test for hypothesized and exploratory indirect relationships.

Consistent results were found for sequential mediation from ORPCF to employee investment of the self into the job, to JPO, to supervisor-rated helping and voice OCBs. Employees' perception of their relational psychological contract fulfillment (social exchange) did not simultaneously mediate the relationships between ORPCF and employees' OCBs.

Psychological ownership presents a complement to social exchange to explain effects of relational psychological contract fulfillment on employee outcomes. Because of the cross-sectional nature of the data conclusions about causality are quite limited.

Organizations and managers should emphasize that fulfillment of relational psychological contract obligations represent a significant investment in employees, who reciprocate by investing themselves into their work. This in turn bolsters JPO and its positive employee outcomes.

This is the first study to directly compare social exchange and psychological ownership explanations for effects of psychological contract fulfillment on employees.

Authentic leadership and psychological ownership appear to be at somewhat similar stage of construct evolution. In the present study, the author asks two research questions: first, how authentic leadership relates to psychological ownership and second, how dyadic duration influences this relationship. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using correlational research design, the author collected cross-sectional data from 182 Indian professionals working in various organizations in India. The author used structural equation modeling to test the study hypotheses.

The results showed that authentic leadership positively influenced organization-based promotive psychological ownership; however, it shared no relationship with preventive psychological ownership or territoriality. Relational transparency and self-awareness factorials of authentic leadership influenced belongingness and self-efficacy factorials of psychological ownership beyond what authentic leadership as the second-order factor could account for. Leader self-awareness negatively related to follower self-efficacy. Authentic leadership completely accounted for the effects of moral perspective and balanced processing factorials on psychological ownership. Dyadic duration was not found to have significant moderation effect.

Overall, the findings imply that authentic leadership may make followers dependent and allow less relational substitutability. Moral perspective may be more central to authentic leadership construct than self-awareness. Moreover, it may not be appropriate to consider territoriality as a part of psychological ownership construct.

The author believes that it is the first study to investigate the factorial-level interrelations between authentic leadership and psychological ownership. It can help in advancing authentic leadership theory and refining psychological ownership construct.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the meditating role of psychological ownership which includes both organisation-based psychological ownership (OPO) and knowledge-based psychological ownership (KPO) on the relationship between affective commitment and knowledge sharing.

This paper is an empirical study based on structural equation modelling, with a sample of 293 employees from 31 high-technology firms in China.

The result indicated that affective commitment had a significant positive effect on OPO but no effect on KPO; OPO was positively related to both common and key knowledge sharing, while KPO exerted a negative impact on both; common knowledge sharing was positively related to key knowledge sharing; the relationship between affective commitment and key knowledge sharing was multi-mediated by OPO and common knowledge sharing.

OPO and KPO play an essential role in transferring the effect of employees’ affective commitment to common knowledge sharing and key knowledge sharing, which unravels the blackbox of how effective commitment affects knowledge sharing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of psychological ownership (both job and organisational based) on extra-role behaviours among family and non-family employees in small overseas Chinese family businesses.

Empirical evidence was drawn from a survey of 80 family owners/managers and non-family employees from 40 small overseas Chinese family businesses from the transport industry in Malaysia. All proposed hypothesis were tested using hierarchical moderated regression analyses.

Job-based psychological ownership was found to significantly predict both types of extra-role behaviours. Organisational-based psychological ownership, however, was only a significant predictor of voice extra-role behaviour. Interestingly enough, no significant moderating effects on the relationships between the two dimensions of psychological ownership and two types of extra-role behaviour were found.

Having a dedicated workforce of both family and non-family employees who are willing to display extra-role behaviours may be considered as an essential component of business success and long-term continuity for many family firms around the world. This particular paper represents one of the few empirical efforts to examine the extra-role behaviours of employees in family firms from emerging economies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the curvilinear relationship between knowledge leadership and knowledge hiding and the moderating role of psychological ownership on influencing the curvilinear relationship.

In total, 403 data were collected from participants in a high-technology company via a two-wave survey. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Results revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between knowledge leadership and knowledge hiding. The employees exhibited more knowledge hiding in a moderate level of knowledge leadership than in lower and higher levels of knowledge leadership. Moreover, psychological ownership significantly moderated the curvilinear relationship such that the inverted U-shaped relationship was more pronounced among employees with high psychological ownership.

Employees’ reaction to knowledge leadership may vary from different levels of knowledge leadership. Moreover, organizations should boost employees’ psychological ownership especially for the collective identity that helps them own knowledge as “ours.”

This study extends both the leadership and knowledge management behavior literatures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of employees’ perceptions of high-performance work systems (HPWS) on unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB), and explores the mediating role of psychological ownership and the moderating role of moral identity.

The hypotheses were tested by using two-wave survey data that were collected from 306 employees in Chinese enterprises.

This study found that HPWS were positively related to UPB, and psychological ownership partially mediated this relationship. Results also revealed that moral identity negatively moderated the relationship between psychological ownership and UPB, and the indirect effect of HPWS on UPB via psychological ownership was weaker for employees high in moral identity.

The generalizability of the findings is limited, and the cross-sectional data cannot draw any clear causal inference among variables.

Managers should pay attention to the “dark side” of HPWS and incorporate ethics in the HPWS. Moreover, organizations should provide correct guidance for their pro-organizational behaviors to avoid employees doing bad things for good reasons.

This study first extends HPWS research to employee’s UPB, uncovers employees’ psychological ownership toward organizations as the pivotal mechanism underlying this relationship, and indicated moral identity can regulate employees unethical behavior.