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The History of Psychological Ownership and Its Emergence in Consumer Psychology

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Psychological Ownership and Consumer Behavior

Abstract

This chapter is about the history of the construct psychological ownership and its migration into consumer psychology. The emergence of the construct in the organizational sciences is largely one of “serendipity” followed by our ability to “stand upon the shoulders of giants” whose prior reflections on the concept of ownership, and especially its manifestation as a psychological phenomenon, were extremely illuminating. We start with comments on what we believe to be the origins of the construct psychological ownership. This is followed by an overview of the theory of psychological ownership as both an individual and collective phenomenon. Finally, we conclude this chapter with a discussion of the emergence of the construct into the realm of consumer psychology.

From Isaac Newton’s letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1676. Some of the giants that have aided this work on psychological ownership include Helga Dittmar, Lita Furby, William James, Susan Isaacs, Leon Litwinski, and Floyd Rudmin to name just a few.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Catherine Webb (1912, p. 138) speculated that “by making [an employee] a shareholder in the business employing him … it stimulates his zeal and careful working.” A similar observation was made in a U.S. News and World Report article stating that “when a worker is given a piece of the action, he will be motivated to work harder, grip less. Turnover, absenteeism, and grievances all might diminish” (1976, p. 68). It had also been claimed that worker alienation and organizational effectiveness problems could be ameliorated by the implementation of an employee ownership arrangement (Derrick & Phipps, 1969; Vanek, 1975).

  2. 2.

    Following this work Brown and his colleagues (Brown, Pierce, & Crossley, 2014) explored in more detail the emergence of the job design – psychological ownership relationship. To achieve this end, they developed scales for measuring two of the three routes (i.e., intimate knowing and investment of the self; while a scale for the measurement of experienced control was available from the work of Tetrick and LaRocco, 1987) to psychological ownership. They observed the mediating effects of the three route variables in the job complexity – psychological ownership relationship, thereby providing the first empirical support for prior theorizing on the “routes” to the emergence of this sense of ownership.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management Studies, Labovitz School of Business and Economics, University of Minnesota-Duluth, Duluth, MN, USA

    Jon L. Pierce

  2. Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Joann Peck

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  1. Jon L. Pierce
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Correspondence to Jon L. Pierce .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

    Joann Peck

  2. Anderson School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Suzanne B. Shu

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Pierce, J.L., Peck, J. (2018). The History of Psychological Ownership and Its Emergence in Consumer Psychology. In: Peck, J., Shu, S. (eds) Psychological Ownership and Consumer Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77158-8_1

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