Psychological Ownership and the Entrepreneurial Behavior of Middle Managers
[We’re pleased to welcome Michael Mustafa of the University of Nottingham. Michael recently published an article in Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, entitled “Psychological Ownership, Job Satisfaction, and Middle Manager Entrepreneurial Behavior” with co-authors Lee Martin and Mathew Hughes.]
It has been widely postulated that individual entrepreneurial actions are the key to driving a firms innovative capacity and building a entrepreneurial mindset among employees. This particular study was motivated by need to better understand what drives individuals to behave entrepreneurially inside an organization. Specifically, we interested in uncovering how and why managers may act
entrepreneurially, if they have no formal ownership status within the organization. Instead we consider, under what alternative ownership situations managers might choose to behave entrepreneurially. Specifically we turned to the concept of Psychological ownership as a means of understanding this;
Our findings were able to confirm a relationship between a middle managers psychological ownership and their entrepreneurial behaviour. We found that this relationship was mediated by their satisfaction with their job.
Our study is unique that we look at a new concept, psychological ownership, as means of understanding of how and why managers may choose behave entrepreneurially. Specifically, our study suggests that organizations can do well to enhance employees and managers ownership feelings through creating the ideal organizational conditions.
The abstract for the paper:
Despite the importance of middle managers’ entrepreneurial behavior for corporate entrepreneurship, there is still a lack of knowledge about its determinants. Knowledge of the role of individual psychological states and work attitudes remains particularly thin. Through an empirical investigation into 136 middle managers in a large Singapore telecommunications firm, this study finds that psychological ownership is positively related to entrepreneurial behavior and job satisfaction within these middle managers. The study further finds that job satisfaction is positively related to entrepreneurial behavior and mediates the relationship between psychological ownership and entrepreneurial behavior. This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the relationship between psychological ownership and pro-organizational behavior, extending psychological ownership research into the field of corporate entrepreneurship via middle managers’ entrepreneurial behavior.
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*Image attributed to WorldSkills UK (CC)
