Category Archives: Uncategorized

“Ownership is a choice – it’s up for grabs“ – Bernadette Kamleitner in conversation with Michael Heller

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Have you ever observed children at a playground, engaged in heated disputes over a cherished toy, all the while passionately screaming, “Mine!”? It might make you wonder: When do we claim ownership over something? Is it when we first possessed it? When we firmly grasp it in our hands? Or perhaps when we’ve worked for it?

As part of the opening of the POP Library at the WU Vienna, Bernadette Kamleitner and Michael Heller talk about Heller’s book “MINE!” and explore questions about ownership, such as what we can own and whether there is something we cannot own.

Find out more about the science of ownership in the video below.

Do consumers feel more innovative when owning an innovative smartphone?

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How anthropomorphism attenuates the effect of psychological ownership on product‐to‐self judgment

When we own a product, it’s not uncommon to feel a sense of connection and identification with it. Consumers may even judge themselves by assimilating the characteristics of products they own. For instance, someone owning an innovative smartphone might feel more innovative.

In their recent study, Zhang (Renmin University of China), Zhou (Renmin University of China), and Yan (NYU Shanghai) sought to explore whether product‐level variables could impact product‐to‐self judgment. They aimed to understand why consumers tend to integrate certain products with the self while excluding others, even when experiencing psychological ownership of the product.

Through a series of three experiments, the researchers shed light on the interplay between psychological ownership, product anthropomorphism, and consumer self-perception. They found that the product-to-self judgment effect does not hold for anthropomorphized products: Consumers are less likely to categorize anthropomorphized products as part of the “Self.” Instead, they view these products as entities separate from their own self.

You can read more about the research of Zhang, Zhou, & Yan (2023) here.

SJDM Poster Award 2020: Signaling Status by Acquiring Ownership (vs. Access)

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As an alternative to ownership, access-based consumption allows consumers to gain access to products by paying a usage fee. Such fees tend to be lower than purchase prices. Can access-based consumption therefore reduce perceived social inequality?

Two weeks ago, Yang Guo (University of Pittsburgh) and Cait Lamberton (University of Pennsylvania) presented their poster “Signaling Status by Acquiring Ownership (vs. Access)” at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM 2020). Their research challenge the assumption that access-based consumption reduces social inequality by highlighting the role of acquisition modes (owning vs. accessing) as status signals. Ownership maintains a premium in status signaling, and thus, access-based consumption may even intensify rather than reduce social inequality. The research by Guo and Lamberton shows that individuals have a higher subjective social rank when they own but their friend accesses similar products, compared to when acquisition modes are reversed. However, the status signaling effectiveness of acquisition modes changes as a function of payment structure (when ownership is achieved via extended payments vs. an immediate lump sum), and the framing given to the access-based alternative (when access-based consumption is framed as a rent-to-own option).

By showing that access-based consumption options may not effectively reduce perceived social inequality, Yang Guo won the Society of Judgment and Decision Making’s Student Poster Award. Congratulations!

You can find the poster here.

What Business Leaders can learn from the Psychology of Ownership

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A GUEST COMMENTARY BY FABIAN BERNHARD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT AT EDHEC BUSINESS SCHOOL IN FRANCE

TSOO: You have been doing research  in the field of ownership, could you please tell us the main insights?

Our constitution* states that „Property entails obligations.” Accordingly, owners of an object have certain rights and duties how to act with their possessions. Most people are very much familiar with this legal aspect of ownership. Less known, however, are the psychological aspects of the feeling of ownership. Research during the past decade has started looking into this phenomenon referred to as “psychological ownership”.

Psychological ownership influences human thinking and acting. And indeed latest research in the field of neuroscience confirms what philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and business scholars have suspected and theorized for a long time. Ownership about material and immaterial objects has a strong motivational force on the way we act and our attitude towards things. Once we call an object “ours” and feel like having the right to possess it we tend to taking better care of it. We are motivated to closely paying attention to the owned object, supporting it, improving it, and also have difficulties relinquishing it.

While the psychological effects of ownership are present in all aspects of our daily lives, it is particularly the business world that has become interested in using psychological ownership as a motivational tool managing their workforce. The idea is to make employees feel and act like owners. When they feel like the organization is ‘theirs’ they potentially put more effort into it. However, rather than giving out shares and making employees factual and “legal” owners, it has been shown that the mere ownership feeling can increase individual commitment and performance.

Given these desirable outcomes the question arises how to actively influence employees’ psychological ownership. Together with a psychologist we looked deeper into this phenomenon. In a quantitative study of 50 companies we examined the ownership feelings of over 200 employees. We found that psychological ownership can depend on the business owners’ leadership style. Certain business owners in our study were more transformational in their leadership to their employees than others. They acted as role-models, provided their workforce a general vision but left enough autonomy for their followers to find their own ways to fulfill goals. Employees under such leadership were more likely to develop ownership feelings. On the other side, results showed that transactional leaders, meaning those that put emphasis on extrinsic rewards and control created them to a lesser degree. While transactional leaders were still effective, a third group of leaders, those who followed a “laissez-faire” approach, meaning not giving enough guidance to employees, blocked the emergence of ownership feelings.

In line with these findings, the study also showed that those employees with higher degrees of psychological ownership demonstrated more positive attitudes and behaviors. For example, the psychological owners displayed higher levels of performance and were more willing to go the extra mile. They helped their colleagues more often, were more committed, and more satisfied in their jobs. As a consequence psychological ownership also created more loyalty towards the company and among the workforce.

In a second series of more recent studies with colleagues from the universities of Mannheim and Rostock, we investigated in more depth how some leaders exert their influence on psychological ownership. For example, we examined the effects of emotional exhaustion of service workers and customer appreciation of their work. Similarly, we could show a relationship of certain leadership styles on employee welfare and an organizational climate of initiative taking.

Overall, the studies illustrated the potential power of ownership feelings in organizational settings and the difference well-suited leadership can make. Psychological ownership also plays a particularly relevant role in closely-held companies in several ways. First, it has been argued that founders of businesses work harder and longer hours than most employees. This may have to do with ownership feelings. When we work for our “own” ideas or projects our motivation is usually highest. We regularly observe such effect in enthusiastic start-up entrepreneurs working long hours to make their business “fly”. So, ownership feelings may be the motivational fire in entrepreneurial business endeavors.

Second, many business founders would like to see that the entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to the business transfers to the next generation. Accordingly, they ask how to convey ownership feelings to their future successors. In a research project with American colleagues we tackled this issue and investigated several teaching approaches to stimulate emotional attachment and psychological ownership in the next generation of young family business members.

And lastly, it is also of interest for family-owned businesses to find ways to include and keep those motivated who are not part of the family, namely the nonfamily employees and external managers. Together with two colleagues from the University of St. Gallen we found that justice and fairness perceptions play an essential role for the development of ownership feelings in the nonfamily personnel. By means of creating a fair environment family-owners could create a motivated and committed team.

Prof. Dr. Fabian Bernhard is an Associate Professor of Management and a member of the Family Business Center at EDHEC Business School in France. He is also a research fellow at the University of Mannheim in Germany, where he also had studied business administration. A scholarship led him to the University of Oregon from where he graduated with an MBA. After working several years at a large, international consulting company in New York, he returned to academia in 2007. During the following years as a PhD student at the European Business School (EBS) and the WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany, he developed the ideas of his book on “Psychological Ownership in Family Businesses”. After having completed his doctoral degree in 2011, he was a research professor at INSEEC Business School in Paris and an adjunct professor at the Family Enterprise Center (FEC) at Stetson University of Florida in the US.

Fabian Bernhard’s current topics of interest revolve around the intersection of organizational behavior, organizational psychology, and family business research. In particular, Fabian is interested in the emotional dynamics in family businesses, moral emotions (such as shame and guilt), the education and preparation of next generational family business leaders, as well as all kinds of  attachment to the family business, such as psychological ownership, commitment, social identity, and their influence on the decision-making process in family businesses. If you want to know more about Fabian, feel free to visit his profile at EDHEC [CLICK HERE].

This article was originally published in transfer – Werbeforschung & Praxis, (03/ 2017) 

Why We Are So Attached to Our Things – A TED-Ed Lesson about Ownership by Christian Jarrett

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Dear readers,

We would like to share a really neat video with you that sums up the phenomenon of ownership quite nicely in under 5 minutes. It was created by Christian Jarrett as part of a TED-Ed lesson on ownership and endowment.

 

The entire TED-Ed lesson content can be accessed here: [CLICK].

Yours,

The Science of Ownership team

Personal Data and (Psychological) Ownership: A Book Chapter by Bernadette Kamleitner & Vince Mitchell

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We are writing the year 2017, an era with a higher population of mobile gadgets than people (GSMA Intelligence 2017), where we easily create a 10 million Blu-ray discs amount of data each day (Walker 2015). A substantial fraction of these data represents virtual copies of our very selves. From digitally tracking our personal health over religiously using our loyalty cards for better deals to simply surfing the Internet for information – where we go, what we do and consume, how we behave and feel is not a private matter anymore (Haddadi & Brown 2014). Despite heightened public concern about how personal data is collected and used (Pew Research Center 2014), we rarely think about oversharing when we download apps, sign up for mailing lists, or give away our personal details in exchange for a boost in convenience and temporary well-being. What is more, the question of who holds legitimate claim over these data – legally as well as psychologically – is still fuelling an undisputed yet to date unsatisfactory debate.

In a new book chapter to appear in a book on ownership that Joann Peck and Suzanne Shu are editing for Springer, Bernadette Kamleitner from WU Vienna and Vince Mitchell who is just about to move from London to The University of Sydney are exploring these and related questions in detail and come to surprising conclusions about the logic of ownership in the context of personal data. Read for yourself what they discovered in the abstract below. The matching first-draft of the chapter in its entirety can be downloaded [HERE]:

In the age of information everything becomes mined for the nuggets giving rise to it: data. Yet, who these new treasures do and should belong to is still being hotly debated. With individuals often acting as the source of the ore and businesses acting as the miners, both appear to hold a claim. This chapter contributes to this debate by analyzing whether and when personal data may evoke a sense of ownership in those they are about. Juxtaposing insights on the experience and functions of ownership with the essence of data and practices in data markets, we conclude that a very large fraction of personal data defies the logic and mechanisms of psychological possessions. In the canon of reasons for this defeat, issues of data characteristics, obscuring market practices, and data’s mere scope are center stage. In response, we propose to condense the boundless collection of data points into the singularized and graspable metaphor of a digital blueprint of the self. This metaphor is suggested to grasp the notion of personal data. To also enable consumers to effectively manage their data, we advocate adopting a practice commonly used with plentiful assets: the establishment of personal data agents and managers.

References

GSMA Intelligence. (2017), available at https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/

Haddadi & Brown (2014), Quantified Self and the Privacy Challenge, Technology Law Futures.

Kamleitner & Mitchell (2017). Can consumers experience ownership for all their personal data? From issues of scope and invisibility agents handling our digital footpring. In press

Pew Research Center (2014). Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era. November 12. http://www.pewresearch.org.

Walker (2015). Every Day Big Data Statistics – 2.5 Quintillion Bytes of Data Created Daily. Available at http://www.vcloudnews.com/every-day-big-data-statistics-2-5-quintillion-bytes-of-data-created-daily/

 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF JOB-BASED PSYCHOLOGICAL OWNERSHIP

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A GUEST COMMENTARY BY BOBBY BULLOCK, CONSULTANT & RESEARCHER

The concept of psychological ownership (PO) as we know and understand today has originated from the field of organizational behavior and psychology. More precisely, Pierce, Kostova & Dirks (2001, 2003) were the first ones to coin the term and establish a theory of PO in organizations. Defined as “the state in which individuals feel as though the target of ownership (material or immaterial in nature) or a piece of it is “theirs”, they were able to show that PO develops through three distinct routes: control over, self-investment in, and intimate knowledge of the target of ownership (Pierce et al. 2003). In addition to these three routes, many scholars have argued that personality and disposition may also matter for the emergence of PO, yet this has never been properly tested.

In his PhD thesis, our current guest author Bobby Bullock, has explored this gap in the literature and has taken a closer look at the relationship between personality, job autonomy and psychological ownership. Moreover, he has looked at how the well-established routes through which PO is said to emerge come into play in the context of organizational employment.

But read for yourself what Bobby Bullock has to say:

Psychological ownership has come to light as an important state with strong implications on employee attitudes and behaviors.  However, relatively little attention has been paid towards the process by which employees come to develop feelings of psychological ownership towards their work, particularly regarding the role played by individual traits in this process.  Ownership theorists claim that personality and disposition should matter (Mayhew, Ashkanasy, Bramble, & Gardner, 2007; Pierce & Jussila, 2011), yet these claims remain largely untested.

The purpose of the current investigation is to address these gaps by exploring how employee disposition and job design contribute to the development of job-based psychological ownership.  Employing a cross-sectional approach, data were collected using an online survey where participants were asked to complete measures of trait positive affectivity (PA), job characteristics, work experiences, and job-based psychological ownership.  Because the study focused on job-related phenomena, participants were required to work full-time in a location other than their home to be considered for this study.  The final 426 participants (60.4% male, 39.6% female) had an average tenure of 5.04 years (SD = 5.03) and represented a wide range of industries and job levels (23.7% entry-level, 31.0% individual contributor, 17.8% supervisory, 10.8% mid-level manager, 2.8% senior manager, 13.8% technical or professional).  Hypotheses were tested using bootstrapped regression analyses and structural equation modeling.

Results indicated that job autonomy has a positive effect on job-based psychological ownership (B = 0.501, CI 0.415 to 0.594) through three mediated paths:  investment of ideas, effort, and self into one’s work (B = 0.252, CI 0.178 to 0.349), experienced control and influence over one’s work (B = 0.214, CI 0.137 to 0.293), and intimate knowledge and understanding of one’s job (B = 0.036, CI 0.003 to 0.082).  Employee PA significantly moderated the mediated path from autonomy to ownership through experienced control (Index of ModMed = 0.017, CI 0.000 to 0.045), such that control mattered more for high-PA employees.  Exploratory analyses suggest that PA may play a dual role – as a moderator of autonomy’s effects on control (B = 0.052, CI 0.009 to 0.100), and as an indirect effect on ownership itself.  For example, high-PA employees reported greater investment of self in their work, which in turn predicted job-based psychological ownership (B = 0.255, CI 0.177 to 0.361).

Ultimately, job autonomy stood out as having a particularly strong and consistent positive effect on job-based psychological ownership.  Results suggest that all employees, from the most enthusiastic to the most apathetic can experience this positive psychological state.  That is, as long as they are afforded a high level of autonomy in deciding how to plan and carry out their work.

If you are interested in reading the full paper including more detailed results, please click here.

About Bobby:

Dr. Robert Bullock is a management consultant with a background in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology. Since 2010 he has been a staff consultant at Scontrino–Powell, Inc., a Seattle-based I-O consulting firm. As a consultant Robert specializes in qualitative and quantitative assessment (i.e., employee surveys, leadership evaluations, developmental needs assessments, organizational assessments, validation studies), learning and development (i.e., training workshops, on-the-job learning, leadership coaching, training evaluation), and continuous improvement (i.e., Lean workshops, continuous process improvement, culture change). He has provided those services to dozens of clients across a diverse range of sectors and industries, including Fortune 500 companies, state agencies, and the high-tech, education, health care, and non-profit sectors. As a scientist Robert has published and presented research on the psychology of ownership, organizational citizenship behaviors, and job design. He enjoys writing and has had articles published in several outlets including Forbes, Bloomberg, Profiles International, and more.

For more about Bobby, please click here.

Editor’s note: All references can be found in the whitepaper, which you can download here.

The Voice of Practice: How Technology is Challenging the Conventional Wisdom of Ownership

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A GUEST COMMENTARY BY ERIK CHAN, TECH ENTREPRENEUR & CO-FOUNDER OF ROCKETCLUB.CO

So here it comes, the first The Voice of Practice contribution. What follows is a guest commentary by tech entrepreneur Erik Chan. Erik is the co-founder of RocketClub (www.rocketclub.co), an online platform that empowers people to earn shares of new business ideas by promoting and adopting them from the start. In his commentary he talks about how technology has changed the way ownership is viewed and what this means for the tech industry. Before we let Erik speak, however, let us from The Science of Ownership give you a small scientific bracket to the topic:

Sophisticated online social technologies have substantially altered the way consumers and companies interact and create value (Bernoff & Li 2008; Prahalad & Ramaswamy 2004). Traditionally, the former were simply listening to what the latter had to say and offer. Now, consumers are invited to actively participate in a variety of business-related decisions on social media and the likes (Berthon et al. 2008, Hautz et al. 2014). This power shift from the firm to the consumer has paved the way for novel concepts and business models like crowdfunding (Ordanini et al. 2011, Thürridl & Kamleitner 2016).

It has changed how new ideas, products and even firms are created. This, in turn, is challenging our conventional understanding of ownership – the line between what (is perceived to) belongs to the company and what to the consumers is becoming increasingly blurred. From literature we know that there are three major routes to ownership: control, intimate knowledge, and investment of the self (Pierce et al. 2001, 2003). When individuals co-create with companies or contribute their personal resources, all three routes may actually be activated. Consumers are able to a) control the outcome of the final product, service, or venture, b) acquire knowledge over time, and c) invest their own resources, ideas, values and identity into the process. In turn, they may start to feel that the respective product, idea, or venture is also “theirs”.

So much for the theory, let’s hear what Erik has to say about it:

In the technology startup industry, the idea of ownership holds much significance. We have seen controversies over who owned the idea behind successful companies of today; who owned the trademarks, who owned the code, and of course, who owned the equity. Each and every input in a company can have contributed to its success. While many controversies focus on the legal (and financial) components of successful companies, there is also a factor of pride. For cofounders, early employees, investors, it’s the opportunity to proclaim “I did this. I saw the potential in it. I made it happen. I was part of it.” Often, founders end up suing the company they founded for more than a share in the financial rewards, it’s also because they want to be recognized as an ‘owner’ or ‘contributor’.  

Recently, we have seen a lot of emphasis on a startup company’s initial users or customers. Ycombinator, the prominent startup accelerator who incubated successful companies including Reddit, Airbnb, and Dropbox, evangelizes the idea of acquiring 100 customers who love what your company offers than 10,000 who just care (see http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2014/06/03/jessica-livingston-why-startups-need-to-focus-on-sales-not-marketing/). The idea is to acquire 100 customers who love your product so much they are willing to use it even when no one else is using it, bare through multiple product iterations, and deal with product bugs because they see and believe in the potential. These early customers believe that one day, just like the founder, they will be able to say “I was part of it.” Not surprisingly, the involvement of these customers also make them feel as if they ‘own’ the idea as well.

Although largely unscientific, tech startups do many things to try increase their users’ feeling of ownership’. Traditionally, these include awarding users with digital points and badges, offering physical articles like t-shirts and stickers, early access to new features, throwing events, and other exclusive priorities. Success examples include early Reddit users receiving t-shirts and handwritten christmas cards, the first AirBnb hosts welcoming the founders to sleep at their apartments, Facebook users staking their personal profile URLs and many more. 

Due to high startup company valuations today (cash rich startups offering an assortment of perks and freebies to their customers), many companies starting out face the challenge of whether a t-shirt is enough for its early users to feel a sense of ownership. Having struggled with rewarding early adopters for their involvement at my previous companies, I decided to build a platform called RocketClub to help companies distribute a real stake in the company to these early customers and supporters. The idea is that it is only a matter of time until early customers, critical to a company’s success, will transition from ‘psychological owners’ to also become real, legal owners. Consequently, we learned through numerous discussions with both company founders and our community of users that the feeling of ownership in a startup is not determined solely by equity ownership. And since, RocketClub has expanded to offering other means of facilitating this ownership through examples such as access to the founders, a say in the development of the product and features, as well as access to ongoing developments at the company, and many others.

Given the dizzying array of products new and old in the market today, entrepreneurs and managers are turning to incentivizing early users and customers to become part of the process/experience. The majority of startup companies fail today because they lack adoption from early stakeholder customers. Imparting ownership onto your early customers is one of few ways to help companies build a bridge between them. No company succeeds without a following behind it and early adoption goes hand in hand with imparting the psychological feeling of ownership.

What is your take? Do you agree with Erik or do you have contrary beliefs? Please use the comment section to share your thoughts with us and our readers.

About Erik:

A serial entrepreneur and technologist, Erik Chan is founder CEO of RocketClub. Previously, he cofounded MicroPay Technology, a game payments company, and social and online game companies 28wins and Bottomless Pit Games. Prior to Erik becoming an entrepreneur, he spent time at Activision Blizzard and Midway Games first as a system engineer and then as a producer. 

Erik holds a MSc in Management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a MBA from Tsinghua University, and a BSc in Biomedical engineering with computer science from Johns Hopkins University. Erik Chan also spent time doing research at the Center of Bits and Atoms and the Software Agents group at the MIT Media lab.

Editor’s note:

  • For references to the articles mentioned in this post, please visit our Links & Resources Section

Introducing Our New Category: The Voice of Practice

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voiceofpractice

Dear community,

Science – including The Science of Ownership – would not matter as much, if it had no implications for and would not be inspired by the real world out there. Though The Science of Ownership is primarily about research on the notion of ownership, we decided to extend our current lens and introduce a brand new category to this blog: The Voice of Practice.

As the name already suggests, we are trying to get practitioners and non-researchers views to find out how, why, when, and most importantly where the experience of ownership strikes and impacts our daily lives. We will co-operate with industry experts and potentially also interested lay people. We will give them the chance to reflect on the topic of ownership based on their practical know-how and everyday experiences. Sometimes, we will invite people. At other times, we will introduce individuals who have approached us.

Either way, we are excited to see how this new category will contribute to our vision: to create a much-needed and unified understanding of the diverse and fascinating concept of ownership.

If you have comments or questions on The Voice of Practice or would like to see a particular voice featured, please feel free to contact us anytime. For now, we wish you a lovely week.

All the best,

The Science of Ownership Team