Development and validation of the collective psychological ownership scale in organizational contexts

Collective psychological ownership (CPO) refers to the sense shared by group mates that they jointly own their organization. CPO is an important emerging concept but its operationalization is still at an early stage. The study aimed to develop and evaluate the CPO scale among social service workers. The item pool together with a battery of validation scales formed the basis for an Internet-based survey. Through convenience and snowball sampling strategies, social service workers in Guangdong Province, China were invited to take part in the survey, resulting in 444 completed questionnaires. Bi-factor analyses were conducted. Both exploratory and confirmatory analyses of bi-factor analyses supported the one-general-two-specific structure of CPO. Internal consistency, assessed by Cronbach’s alpha, was satisfactory for the bi-factor structure. Convergent and divergent validity were supported by the correlations with validation scales in the expected directions. The general factor was named shared possessiveness, and the two specific factors were shared decision-making and shared hardship endurance. With good preliminary psychometric properties, the newly developed CPO scale will trigger a series of studies related to workplace behaviors and well-being.