Collective Psychological Ownership Scale

Authors

Purpose

For years, psychometric research has heavily emphasized individual psychological ownership—the personal feeling that a target is 'mine.' However, many modern work environments rely on team-based structures where success and failure are shared. Prior to the development of this scale, the field lacked a validated instrument to measure the collective sense of 'ours.' This gap limited researchers' ability to empirically test theories about group cohesion, shared responsibility, and collective motivation.

The Collective psychological ownership Scale was designed specifically to address this measurement deficit in organizational contexts. By providing a reliable and valid method to quantify shared ownership, the instrument enables organizational psychologists and human resource professionals to better understand the psychological mechanisms that drive team performance and employee retention. It is a crucial tool for diagnosing group-level engagement and designing interventions aimed at fostering a more cohesive, committed workforce.

Construct

The theoretical foundation of Collective psychological ownership rests on three fundamental human drives: the extension of the self through possessions, the innate need to belong to a social group, and the desire to exert control over one's environment. When applied to a group setting, these drives coalesce into a shared mindset where co-workers collectively identify the organization as their own. This construct goes beyond simple entitlement; it inherently involves a shared identity and a mutual acceptance of responsibility for the organization's trajectory.

The construct is conceptualized as multidimensional, encompassing several core domains. At its center is 'shared possessiveness,' which is the overarching feeling of joint ownership. This is complemented by 'shared impacts,' which reflects the group's perceived influence and involvement in decision-making processes, and 'shared future,' which captures the group's willingness to endure hardships and celebrate successes together. Together, these facets create a comprehensive picture of collective ownership that balances the rights of possession with the responsibilities of stewardship.

Validity

To establish the construct validity of the new instrument, the developers rigorously examined its nomological network by testing its relationships with established workplace variables. Convergent validity was demonstrated through positive correlations with measures of job resources and work engagement, confirming the theoretical prediction that a strong sense of shared ownership aligns with higher levels of workplace motivation and support.

Divergent validity was similarly supported by examining the scale's relationship with employee burnout. As anticipated, higher levels of Collective psychological ownership were inversely related to burnout symptoms, suggesting that feeling like a co-owner of an organization may serve as a protective psychological buffer. These validity checks, conducted on a sample of 444 social service workers, confirm that the scale accurately captures the intended construct and behaves in ways consistent with broader Organizational Psychology theories.

Convergent & Discriminant Validation Correlations

Reference Instrument	Correlation Coefficient (r)
Job resources
Work engagement

Reliability

Internal consistency is a critical metric for any newly developed psychometric tool, as it indicates whether the items reliably measure the same underlying construct. The developers assessed the reliability of the Collective psychological ownership Scale using Cronbach's alpha, focusing on the overarching bi-factor structure.

The results yielded satisfactory internal consistency coefficients, demonstrating that the items cohesively capture the general factor of shared possessiveness as well as the specific sub-facets. This robust reliability ensures that researchers can deploy the scale across different organizational samples with confidence that the measurement of collective ownership will remain stable and internally cohesive.

Factor Analysis

The structural validation of the instrument relied on a sophisticated bi-factor modeling approach, utilizing both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Unlike traditional correlated-traits models, a bi-factor model allows researchers to extract a single, overarching general factor while simultaneously accounting for specific, uncorrelated group factors.

The analyses strongly supported a 'one-general, two-specific' structure. The general factor, labeled 'shared possessiveness,' accounted for the common variance across all items, reflecting the core essence of collective ownership. Simultaneously, the model identified two distinct specific factors: 'shared decision-making' and 'shared hardship endurance.' This structural configuration indicates that while collective ownership is a unified overarching concept, it is practically manifested through specific group behaviors related to operational influence and collective resilience.

Subscales

Subscale	Items	Description
Shared possessiveness		The overarching general factor representing the core collective feeling that the organization belongs jointly to the group.
Shared decision-making		A specific factor capturing the group's perceived collective influence, control, and involvement in the daily operations and choices of the organization.
Shared hardship endurance		A specific factor reflecting the group's mutual commitment to stay with the organization through difficult times and share in collective challenges.

Instrument

Test Type	Self-report questionnaire
Format	Likert scale
Language	Chinese
Population	Employees
Administration	Online survey

Collective Psychological Ownership Scale Items

Sample

The validation study utilized a sample of 444 social service workers located in Guangdong Province, China. Participants were recruited to complete an Internet-based survey using a combination of convenience and snowball sampling strategies.