Research On Knowledge Contribution Loafing Among Engineering Designers From The Perspective Of Psychological Ownership

With the expansion of scale and increasing complexity of engineering designers,the achievement of engineering designs rely on knowledge cooperation between designers with different professional backgrounds and distributed knowledge.In order to protect self-interest and competitive advantage,designers tend to appear knowledge contribution loafing in engineering design practice,which will greatly reduce engineering design and organizational performance.Based on the “external contextpsychological cognition-individual behavior” under the construction of social cognition theory,this study examines the mechanism of the external situation factors in the engineering design organization context effect on knowledge contribution loafing through the psychological ownership among designers.Focusing on the organizational climate,this study proposed that the cross-level mechanism of the self-interest,social-responsibility,and law/professional codes organizational ethical climate effect knowledge contribution loafing through psychological ownership in order to transform the motivation of knowledge contribution loafing among designers.According to regulatory focus theory,psychological ownership is divided into organizational-based psychological ownership(promotion focus)and knowledge-based psychological ownership(prevention focus).This study proposes corresponding theoretical hypotheses and establishes a hierarchical linear model.Data were collected using survey questionnaires and analyzed adopting HLM.The results show that the self-interest organizational ethical climate promotes the designer’s knowledge-based psychological ownership and reduces organizationalbased psychological ownership,thereby strengthening knowledge contribution loafing among designers;the social responsibility organizational ethical climate will weakens the designer’s knowledge-based psychological ownership and promotes organizationalbased psychological ownership,thereby alleviating knowledge contribution loafing among designers;moreover,the law/professional codes organizational ethical climate has direct negative impact on knowledge contribution loafing among designers.From the perspective of leaders’ intervention,this paper constructs a mechanism model of ethical leadership effects on knowledge contribution loafing among designers under the mediation of knowledge-based psychological ownership and the moderation of emotion regulation strategies.Through the hypothesis test of the survey questionnaire data,the results demonstrate that ethical leadership is a key factor to alleviate knowledge contribution loafing.Knowledge-based psychological ownership is a main factor causing knowledge contribution loafing as well as mediates the influence of ethical leadership on knowledge contribution loafing;cognitive reappraisal(a response-focused emotion regulation strategy)moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and knowledge contribution loafing,and the effect of ethical leadership on knowledge contribution loafing is stronger when cognitive reappraisal is high;the expressive suppression strategy of designers has no significant moderating effect on the relationship between ethical leadership and knowledge contribution loafing among designers.To further alleviate knowledge contribution loafing among designers,this study explores the mechanism of perceived organizational support and perceived supervisor support on knowledge contribution loafing among designers through dual psychological ownership from the perspective of individual perception.The theoretical hypothesis are presented and the survey questionnaire data are analyzed.The results show that perceived organizational support and perceived supervisor support will effectively reduce knowledge-based psychological ownership and strengthen organizational-based psychological ownership perception,thereby weakening knowledge contribution loafing;perceived supervisor support mediates between perceived organizational support and designers’ dual psychological ownership.In order to improve the intervention efficiency of external context factors and psychological cognitive factors on designer’s knowledge contribution loafing,this study further introduces the qualitative comparative analysis(QCA)research strategies,adopts semi-structured interviews to collect qualitative data,constructs a theoretical model of influence factors of knowledge contribution loafing among designers,and recognizes different path configurations based on the process mechanism of psychological ownership.The results further affirm the important role of dual psychological ownership in knowledge contribution loafing among designers,and explain the complex interactions among the causes of knowledge contribution loafing.Furthermore,this study has formed a more complete intervention mechanism of external context factors effect on knowledge contribution loafing among designers from the perspective of dual psychological ownership.This study promotes the integration and deepening of multi-level and multi-dimensional intervention mechanisms of contextual factors affecting knowledge contribution loafing from psychological ownership.This study explores the effect of external context factors on knowledge contribution loafing from the perspective of designer’s psychological ownership based on social cognitive theory.It clarifies that psychological ownership is the psychological inducement of knowledge contribution loafing among designers,makes up for the deficiencies of previous studies that focused on the net effect of context factors and ignored the designer’s psychological ownership,and expands the antecedent boundary of knowledge contribution loafing;this thesis breaks the original knowledge gap of knowledge contribution loafing by revealing the intervention mechanism of different types of organizational ethical climate and ethical leadership effects on knowledge contribution loafing among designers,and affirms that ethical elements and emotion regulation are the most critical for regulating designers’ psychological cognition and alleviating knowledge contribution loafing among designers;this study also extends the analytical paradigm of the mechanism of knowledge contribution loafing,provides a further theoretical basis for the effective intervention of psychological ownership effects on knowledge contribution loafing among designers in complex and dynamic engineering design practice,and also provides the theoretical guidance and insights for further deploying effective governance strategies of knowledge contribution loafing by constructing a combined intervention framework of organizational ethical climate,ethical leadership,perceived support,dual psychological ownership and knowledge contribution loafing among designers.