Exploring The Relationship between Employees' Stock Holding and Psychological Ownership

• Main Authors: Chien-Kai Chen, 陳建鎧
• Other Authors: Nien-Chi Liu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/63087752917291717920

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 人力資源管理研究所 === 93 === Psychological ownership has become a vital element to motivate and inspire the associates in high-tech firms. It has been stressed that employees’ psychological ownership emergences play a momentous role to stimulate the performance of the organization. Especially, psychological ownership would be significantly important for high-tech specialists when they perform the role of major producers. On the other hand, enterprises also take employee stock ownership as an efficient means to motivate the workers of the organizations. This would provide a charming benefit and improve organizational performance by motivating employees to promote their shared financial interests with the organization. Based on reviewing literature, this research will try to provide a general understanding on financial ownership and psychological ownership. We propose that psychological ownership may be influenced by two specific factors, financial ownership and stock holding preference. Therefore, firms should let the employees hold the company’s stock for as long as possible. In addition, corporations should do their best to suggest that the employees keep as much of the company’s stock as they can. Employee Stock Option Plans (ESOPs) have been considered useful tools to raise the performance of organizations. Nevertheless, many of the researches in ESOPs failed to link employees’ stock holding status with performance directly, but many studies in psychological ownership do impact performance explicitly. Focusing on the final results, this study will state about how employees’ stock holding status influences their psychological ownership. We categorize employees’ stock holding status as two indicators: stock percentage of an employee’s property, and stock percentage of an employee’s annual compensation and rewards. Moreover, we classify psychological ownership as three groups: feeling of possession, belief, and behavior. We predict that these two types of stock holding statuses have differentiated, as well as complementary, influence on the three classifications of employees’ psychological ownership. On account of preliminary thought, a more abundant and explicit research framework is developed. The theoretical hypotheses are also tested against an empirical data set. We conducted a survey of 610 employees who are working at one individual high-tech company in Taiwan. Eventually, a data set contains 400 associates in our sample. Our findings indicate that stock percentage of an employee’s property and stock percentage of an employee’s annual compensation and rewards have significantly positive effects on employees’ beliefs in psychological ownership. Besides, employees’ beliefs and behaviors in psychological ownership will influence their feelings of possession in psychological ownership. Hence, our results show that there is a positive relationship between employees’ stock holding status with their psychological ownership.