Psychological Ownership of Simple Jobs: The Effect of Job Crafting
Previous research on the relationship of job characteristics and psychological ownership has primarily focused on the specific dimensions of work and possessive behaviors and their impact on employees in complex jobs. This study takes a new path by examining how psychological ownership can be increased for a previously unexamined group, employees in simple (i.e., routine and repetitive) jobs. Based on 2016 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, almost 60% of jobs in the U.S. workforce could be considered to be simple or low in complexity. This study intends to investigate the answer to the following key research question: Can psychological ownership be increased for simple jobs with the inclusion of job crafting? The study proposes that job crafting can be used to make cognitive and physical changes in the task and/or relational boundaries for simple jobs. A large portion of the research in this study involved teasing apart the job crafting, job characteristics, and psychological ownership constructs to specifically determine what variables may relate to higher psychological ownership in the simple jobs. This early examination of the presence and realization of psychological ownership in simple jobs establishes new insight on the relationship of job crafting and psychological ownership being serially mediated by job characteristics (as depicted in the JCM) and the routes to psychological ownership in simple, routine, and repetitive jobs.
psychological ownership, job crafting, simple jobs, job characteristics model, JCM, Business, Business Administration, Management, and Operations, Organizational Behavior and Theory
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations