Abstract
The Collective Psychological Ownership Scale is an empirical psychometric instrument designed to measure the shared, group-level psychological phenomenon wherein organizational members collectively experience a sense that an organization, or a specific facet of their work environment, belongs to them as a collective ("ours"). Developed by Xuebing Su and Siu-man Ng, the instrument addresses a longstanding gap in organizational psychology, which historically prioritized individual-level psychological ownership ("mine") over team-level possessiveness. Evaluated among a sample of 444 social service workers in Guangdong Province, China, the scale evaluates the construct through an advanced bi-factor psychometric framework consisting of one general factor—shared possessiveness—and two distinct group-specific factors: shared decision-making and shared hardship endurance.
Administered via a self-report Likert scale, the instrument exhibits robust psychometric properties. Construct validity is supported via convergent relationships with work engagement and job resources, alongside divergent validity demonstrated by an inverse relationship with occupational burnout symptoms. The bi-factor analytical structure demonstrates that while collective ownership operates as a coherent, unified construct of joint possessiveness, it simultaneously encompasses distinct behavioral and attitudinal subdomains reflecting collective agency and shared resilience. This scale provides researchers and human resource practitioners with an empirically sound, culturally sensitive tool for investigating team dynamics, shared governance, and employee retention across diverse organizational environments.
Keywords
Collective psychological ownership, organizational psychology, bi-factor analysis, scale validation, workplace well-being, group dynamics, employee engagement, job resources, burnout, organizational behavior
Authors
The Collective Psychological Ownership Scale was developed and psychometrically validated by scholars specializing in social work, behavioral health, and organizational behavior:
- Xuebing Su — Affiliated with Hong Kong Baptist University. Su’s research centers on organizational dynamics, employee attitudes, and psychosocial well-being within human service and non-profit organizations.
- Siu-man Ng — Affiliated with the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong). Contact: [email protected]. Professor Ng specializes in mental health, workplace wellness, scale adaptation, and quantitative psychometrics in Asian sociocultural contexts.
Purpose
The primary objective of the Collective Psychological Ownership Scale is to operationalize, quantify, and empirically evaluate the collective sense of ownership that groups of employees share regarding their workplace. While the theoretical foundations of psychological ownership emerged around individual cognition—capturing an employee’s personal assertion that a job, project, or organization is "mine"—contemporary work environments increasingly depend on distributed authority, self-managed teams, and collaborative structures where performance outcomes, risks, and strategic directions are mutually held. Prior to the construction of this dedicated instrument, researchers frequently relied on aggregated individual-level instruments, which fail to capture true collective constructs characterized by emergent, shared psychological states.
In applied organizational research, the scale addresses several theoretical and diagnostic demands:
- Diagnosing Team-Level Engagement: It allows organizational consultants and managers to assess whether workplace cohesion is anchored in genuine collective stewardship rather than mere transactional compliance.
- Evaluating Shared Governance and Democracy: Organizations practicing non-hierarchical management, worker cooperatives, and participatory decision-making can quantify the psychological manifestation of their structural models.
- Predicting Occupational Retention and Burnout: The instrument facilitates empirical investigations into the buffering effects of shared organizational responsibility against occupational stress, particularly in emotionally demanding human service contexts.
- Cross-Cultural Organizational Studies: By establishing validation in an East Asian setting (China), the scale provides a framework for testing collective psychological dynamics across individualist and collectivist cultural orientations.
Psychological Construct
Collective psychological ownership is defined as an emergent, group-level state of mind wherein members of a social collective jointly experience feelings of ownership toward a particular organizational target. It is fundamentally distinct from legal ownership, representing a cognitive-affective condition encapsulated by the perception: "This organization is ours." The construct extends beyond mere organizational commitment or identification by integrating elements of collective territoriality, shared responsibility, and joint stewardship.
The construct operationalized within this instrument consists of three core dimensions configured via a bi-factor framework:
1. Shared Possessiveness (General Factor)
At the center of the construct lies shared possessiveness, which serves as the general factor uniting the entire scale. It captures the psychological core of shared belonging and collective entitlement toward the organization. Unlike personal pride, this dimension reflects an intersubjective consensus among team members that the collective identity and the organizational identity are deeply intertwined. Employees feel collectively responsible for preserving the reputation, integrity, and operational success of their organization.
2. Shared Decision-Making (Specific Group Factor)
This specific behavioral-cognitive facet operationalizes the degree to which employees perceive collective influence, self-determination, and active participation in organizational choices. Rooted in the psychological motive of control over one’s proximal environment, shared decision-making assesses whether the group experiences a joint voice in policy formulation, operational adjustments, and daily workplace workflows. When workers mutually experience high decision-making autonomy, collective ownership transitions from an abstract emotional sentiment into actionable organizational agency.
3. Shared Hardship Endurance (Specific Group Factor)
This affective-conative facet measures the collective resolve to weather organizational adversity, crisis, and resource constraints. It embodies shared resilience and mutual sacrifice. When an organization faces structural or financial challenges, groups high in shared hardship endurance do not defect or disengage; rather, they experience a shared moral and psychological commitment to remain united, absorb stress collaboratively, and safeguard the organization’s future.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework underpinning the Collective Psychological Ownership Scale synthesizes foundational theories from organizational behavior, human motivation, and social psychology:
The Roots of Psychological Ownership
The scale builds directly upon the theoretical foundations established by Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks (2001), who postulated that psychological ownership satisfies three basic human needs: (1) efficacy and control, (2) self-identity, and (3) having a "home" or space of one’s own (belongingness). Pierce and Jussila (2010, 2011) subsequently extended this model to collective entities, demonstrating that through social interaction, communicative exchange, and mutual sense-making, individual psychological ownership coalesces into a shared cognitive-affective reality.
The Extended Self and Social Identity
Drawing on Belk’s (1988) formulation of possessions as components of the "extended self," the collective framework posits that an organization becomes an extension of the collective self. Co-workers merge their social identities with the organizational mission. Furthermore, following social identity theory and Baumeister and Sommer’s (1997) work on belongingness spheres, collective ownership leverages relational and collective spheres of social motivation, reinforcing mutual interdependence over individual self-enhancement.
Routes to Ownership
Theoretical literature outlines three primary generative routes to psychological ownership: exercising control over the target, intimately knowing the target, and investing the self (time, labor, emotional energy) into the target. In a collective setting, these routes become intersubjective: joint control over strategic decisions, shared organizational knowledge, and collective investment in resolving organizational challenges directly foster collective ownership.
Validity
The construct validity of the Collective Psychological Ownership Scale was evaluated using a nomological network approach within a sample of 444 social service professionals in Guangdong Province, China.
Convergent Validity
Convergent validity was evaluated by assessing correlations between collective psychological ownership and established positive workplace constructs:
- Job Resources: Statistically significant positive associations were confirmed between collective psychological ownership and perceived job resources (such as supervisory support, autonomy, and professional development opportunities), confirming the hypothesis that resource-rich organizational climates nurture collective possessiveness.
- Work Engagement: The scale exhibited strong positive correlations with dimensions of employee engagement (vigor, dedication, and absorption), corroborating that joint ownership serves as a powerful motivational catalyst.
Discriminant and Divergent Validity
Divergent validity was examined relative to negative occupational health outcomes, specifically burnout, operationalized via standardized measures like the Maslach Burnout Inventory:
- Occupational Burnout: Demonstrating robust discriminant validity, collective psychological ownership displayed a statistically significant inverse correlation with employee burnout symptoms (emotional exhaustion and depersonalization). This demonstrates that the scale captures an adaptive psychological asset that functions as a buffer against emotional exhaustion in high-stress work settings.
Reliability
The internal consistency of the Collective Psychological Ownership Scale was assessed within the bi-factor structural model framework:
- Cronbach’s Alpha ($lpha$): Classical internal consistency assessments demonstrated high reliability coefficients across the full scale and individual subscales, exceeding standard psychometric thresholds ($lpha ge 0.80$).
- Bi-factor Reliability Metrics: Because multidimensional instruments evaluated via traditional Cronbach’s alpha can overestimate reliability due to blended multidimensional variance, the developers evaluated scale reliability across the general dimension (shared possessiveness) as well as the unique variance captured by the two specific group factors (shared decision-making and shared hardship endurance), confirming that the general factor accounts for stable variance across all administration settings.
Factor Analysis
The structural dimensionality of the instrument was investigated using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) within Mplus, comparing competing structural models:
Bi-Factor Modeling Approach
Rather than relying solely on first-order correlated factor models or second-order hierarchical models, the authors employed a bi-factor measurement model (Reise, 2012; Reise, Morizot, & Hays, 2007). In a bi-factor structure, every observed item loads simultaneously on a single general factor (accounting for common variance shared across all items) and on one specific group factor (accounting for residual variance unique to that substantive sub-domain).
Structural Configuration: "One-General, Two-Specific"
Statistical comparison established that a "one-general, two-specific" model provided superior fit over unidimensional and traditional multi-factor solutions:
- General Factor: Shared Possessiveness, capturing the baseline sentiment of collective ownership common to all items.
- Specific Factor 1: Shared Decision-Making, reflecting collective voice, agency, and operational control.
- Specific Factor 2: Shared Hardship Endurance, capturing collective resilience and willingness to shoulder organizational burdens.
Model fit indices aligned with criteria defined by Hu and Bentler (1998) and Schermelleh-Engel (2003), yielding favorable Comparative Fit Index (CFI), Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI), Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) values.
Instrument / Measurement Tool
- Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric questionnaire
- Construct Assessed: Collective Psychological Ownership
- Original Language: Chinese
- Target Population: Organizational employees, human service workers, and project teams
- Response Scale: Likert scale
- Structural Framework: Multidimensional bi-factor configuration (1 general factor, 2 specific group factors)
- Subscale Breakdown:
- General Factor: Shared Possessiveness
- Specific Factor 1: Shared Decision-Making
- Specific Factor 2: Shared Hardship Endurance
- Administration Format: Internet-based or paper-and-pencil survey
- Scoring Mechanism: Subscale and global composite scores can be derived by computing item averages according to bi-factor scoring procedures or summative aggregation. Higher scores represent stronger collective psychological ownership.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Collective Psychological Ownership Scale was formally published in 2018 in the peer-reviewed academic journal International Social Work. The scale is protected by academic copyright. While the conceptual framework, validation data, and factor structures are publicly disseminated in scholarly literature, the verbatim Chinese item inventory and standardized English translations are maintained by the authors.
Researchers intending to implement the Collective Psychological Ownership Scale for non-commercial academic investigations should direct formal inquiries and permission requests to corresponding author Dr. Siu-man Ng ([email protected]) or refer to the licensing guidelines provided by the publisher (SAGE Publications).
References
- Avey, J. B., Avolio, B. J., Crossley, C. D., & Luthans, F. (2009). Psychological ownership: Theoretical extensions, measurement and relation to work outcomes. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 30(2), 173–191. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.583
- Baumeister, R. F., & Sommer, K. L. (1997). What do men want? Gender differences and two spheres of belongingness: Comment on Cross and Madson (1997). Psychological Bulletin, 122(1), 38–44. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.122.1.38
- Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154
- Brown, G., Lawrence, T. B., & Robinson, S. L. (2005). Territoriality in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 30(3), 577–594. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2005.17293710
- Hu, L., & Bentler, P. M. (1998). Fit indices in covariance structure modeling: Sensitivity to underparameterized model misspecification. Psychological Methods, 3(4), 424–453. https://doi.org/10.1037/1082-989X.3.4.424
- Muthén, L. K., & Muthén, B. O. (1998). Mplus User’s Guide. Muthén & Muthén.
- Pierce, J. L., & Jussila, I. (2010). Collective psychological ownership within the work and organizational context: Construct introduction and elaboration. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 31(6), 810–834. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.628
- Pierce, J. L., & Jussila, I. (2011). Psychological Ownership and the Organizational Context: Theory and Research. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9780857934451
- Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., & Dirks, K. T. (2001). Toward a theory of psychological ownership in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.2307/259124
- Reise, S. P. (2012). The rediscovery of bifactor measurement models. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 47(5), 667–696. https://doi.org/10.1080/00273171.2012.715555
- Reise, S. P., Morizot, J., & Hays, R. D. (2007). The role of the bifactor model in resolving dimensionality issues in health outcomes measures. Quality of Life Research, 16(Suppl 1), 19–31. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-007-9183-7
- Schaufeli, W. B., Leiter, M. P., Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1996). Maslach Burnout Inventory – General Survey (MBI-GS). Consulting Psychologists Press.
- Su, X., & Ng, S. (2018). Collective psychological ownership scale. International Social Work. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020872818767483