Turning Agents into Psychological Principals: Aligning Interests of Non‐Owners Through Psychological Ownership

By Philipp Sieger, Thomas M. Zellweger, Karl Aquino. 2013

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Principals who delegate tasks to agents face the perennial challenge of overcoming agency problems. We investigate whether feelings of ownership among senior managers in the absence of formal ownership can align agents' interests with those of principals, thus turning agents into psychological principals. Using a moderated mediation model, we find that psychological ownership is positively related to company performance through the mediating effect of individual-level entrepreneurial behaviour. We also find that the effect of psychological ownership on individual-level entrepreneurial behaviour and, ultimately, company performance is weaker for high levels of monitoring compared to low levels. These findings offer important contributions to agency, psychological ownership, and entrepreneurship literatures.

Subfields: Accounting, Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04478c4a618b8d9a5b6cec4981b76d5e17ef83b5

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Citations in the corpus

Latent Profile Analysis (2017, methodology): “…et al., 2012) and used established measures to assess performance (Eddleston et al., 2008) which are also highly correlated with objective performance (Ling & Kellermanns, 2010; Sieger et al., 2013), a lagged design with objective performance measures would have strengthened the research design.”
Innovative Behaviour, Trust and Perceived Workplace Performance (2018, unknown): “The individual is likely to be invested in their managers under these circumstances (e.g., Mustafa et al., 2016; Sieger et al., 2013).”
Failure or voluntary exit? Reassessing the female underperformance hypothesis (2015, background): “Building on the small, but growing body of research that explicitly applies PO in the entrepreneurship context (e.g., Sieger et al., 2013; Townsend et al., 2009), our study encourages future research that could measure PO perceptions of female and male business owners and link them empirically to…”