Study Finds Personal Ownership Actually Beneficial To Group Projects

We all know the saying “there is no ‘I’ in team,” which promotes team over individual ownership of a group project. The sentiment is clear and simple, but does the sense of personal ownership over a group project really that detrimental?

For a new study published in the Journal of Organizational and Occupational Psychology, researchers investigated two types of ownership: individual psychological ownership (IPO) and collective psychological ownership (CPO). In other words, “this project is mine” and “this project is ours,” and the researchers wanted to see how these would influence individual and team behavior in a project that required creative output.

The researchers analyzed data from 39 teams with a total of 186 individual members who work at international organizations based in the United States, United Kingdom, China, and Lithuania. The participants were comprised of both team members and project managers.

For the first questionnaire, the team members reported their IPO and CPO towards the specific project they are working on. In the second questionnaire three weeks later, they reported their levels of engagement in the project as well as their creativity. At the same time, the managers also rated the team members’ engagement, and then their creativity three weeks later.

The results revealed that even though CPO has positive effects on engagement and creativity for both the individual members and the team, IPO drives individual engagement and creativity but has the opposite effects on team outcomes.

Simply put, IPO drives the individual members to invest more time and effort into a project, but teams with high IPO are less collectively engaged, thereby decreasing team creativity.

As such, the researchers note that managers should take the time to make individual members feel a sense of personal ownership for the project so that the members will be more invested in it, but at the same time make sure to maintain and develop the team’s collective ownership. This way, the team’s engagement, and creativity can be maximized without risking team performance.

“It may sound trite, but a team is more than just a collection of individuals. When team members only think of themselves as individually owning the project without collective ownership, then creativity drops,” study co-author Kerrie Unsworth of Leeds University Business School said. “There has to be an 'us' as well as an 'I' in a successful team.”