Skip to main content
Research in Brief Home

The Double-edge Sword of Cultivating Employees Who Feel Like Owners

Published: 2024

Sarah Burrows
Assistant Professor

Key Takeaways

  • Psychological ownership is indirectly and positively associated with entrepreneurial intentions and work performance through entrepreneurial self-efficacy, a relationship strengthened by past work performance
  • While psychological ownership presents a significant upside to employers, it also holds the potential to generate entrepreneurial aspirations in some of the best employees, causing firms to lose talent
  • The authors shed light on how an employee’s sense of psychological ownership can provide stable and safe site for establishing self-confidence and ultimately pave the way for their transition from employee to business owner

If you’ve ever felt a sense of possessing your work, that your work belongs to or is an extension of yourself, perhaps you’ve also entertained the thought that you could succeed at running the business yourself. The relationship between a sense of ownership, competency, and entrepreneurial ambition is at the heart of Sarah Burrows’ co-authored research, which draws from psychological ownership (PO) theory and self-verification theory to assess whether feeling like an owner is enough to satisfy potential ownership ambitions, or whether the development of positive self-views motivates workers to develop intentions of becoming business owners themselves. While previous research has focused on PO’s benefits for organizations, Burrows and her colleagues delve into the prospective double-edged nature of PO.

Through a pair of studies, the researchers tested five hypotheses about PO and entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE). The studies explored direct and indirect relationships within the group’s proposed model using a group of full-time employees and by accessing past performance records of sales workers. Findings indicate that those with greater levels of PO also have higher levels of ESE. As a result, they are both more likely to perform better as employees and to consider starting their own business. Attachment to an organization may, in fact, help establish a place where outstanding employees foster a sense of their own abilities to the extent that they can imagine themselves becoming actual owners, effectively creating new competition.

In practice, the group’s findings support the establishment of intrapreneurial culture within organizations that promote PO, allowing employees to actualize their entrepreneurial ambitions within the context of their existing employment. Such a culture could prevent potential talent drain by creating room for employees to exercise entrepreneurial self-views and experience self-efficacy without having to start their own businesses.