A Study On The Factors Related To Psychological Ownership And Professional Executives' Appropriation

The theory of psychological ownership was widely adopted in the west, but it hasn't been studied as yet in China. In this article, this theory is detailedly introduced and validated by some cases, and an empirical study on the factors that may have effects on the rise of psychological ownership is done; and the mechanism of occupational appropriation of professional executives was explained based on the theoryIn the theory, it is indicated that formal ownership doesn't directly relate to the performance of employees, but only when psychological ownership rises by the way of the implement of some rights belonging to it, does it affect on the performance of the employees.An empirical study shows that the psychological ownership of married employees is higher than that of unmarried employees and employees' psychological ownership is rising at the beginning when they participate in an firm and then suspends in a higher level; it also shows that there is some difference between psychological ownership of common employees' and that of managers': the higher is employees' rank, the higher is their psychological ownership.The profits that a man received from a behavior can be divided into economical profit and psychological profit, and so is his expectation for this behavior. Accompanied with the separation of ownership rights and controlling rights, the expected profit of a professional executive is unequal to the factual profit, and this gives the rise of appropriation. If psychological profit dominates the unsatisfied expectation, executives may revenge; if economical profit dominates, he may practice appropriation.The mechanism can be described as below. Ownership determines the factual profits of professional executives directly or indirectly, and, when an executive implements his controlling rights, psychological ownership rises and leads to the rise of profit expectation. Once his factual profit is lower than his expected profit, he may practice appropriation. The wider is the gap between them, the more likely does he practices appropriation.In order to lower the appropriation probability, we can increase factual profit or lower expected profit, and sometimes, increasing psychological profit has greater effect.