Perceptions of Control, Sense of Ownership are Related

A professor of management, one in psychology, and a consultant looked at the connection between job control and sense of ownership through a survey of 239 individuals in a range of jobs and industries in New Zealand. A separate survey of the individuals' 71 managers allowed the researchers to compare the workers' and managers' opinions on the work environment. For this study, "control" was defined as the degree to which a worker was able to make decisions about his or her work. "Ownership" was the degree to which they felt personally responsible for workload or quality and used personal terms to describe their work: "'This is MY organization,' 'I sense that this is MY company.'"

The study found that the more control someone had over their work, the more ownership they felt. The work environment had a major impact on how much control the workers felt. The less routine the work, the more freedom they had to make decisions, and the more they participated in decision-making about their work, the more control they felt.

But it was not enough for those work conditions to be present. How much control the worker believed he or she had affected whether the right work environment actually created a sense of ownership. As marketers say, perception is everything.

[Editor's note: This study only tells us that these factors are related to each other, and does not prove that, for example, a perception of control caused a sense of ownership. Also, it did not measure whether sense of ownership increased performance in this group of people, although that sense has in other studies.]

Source: Pierce, J., M. O'Driscoll, and A. Coghlan (04), "Work Environment Structure and Psychological Ownership: The Mediating Effects of Control," The Journal of Social Psychology 144(5):507.