Psychological Ownership in Shared Digital Workspaces

Joann S. Yim

Psychological Ownership in Shared Digital Workspaces

Author(s)	Prof. Joann S. Yim
Country	United States
Abstract	Shared digital workspaces have become central to contemporary collaborative work. Cloud documents, collaborative repositories, shared project boards, virtual whiteboards, group communication platforms, digital design environments, and other jointly editable systems allow several individuals to contribute to the same informational or creative artifact. Such arrangements complicate traditional assumptions about ownership because legal ownership, authorship, access rights, editing authority, and subjective feelings of possession do not necessarily coincide. Psychological ownership theory provides a useful framework for understanding this tension because individuals can experience an object, task, idea, digital artifact, or organizational resource as psychologically “mine” or “ours” even without formal ownership rights. Foundational research identifies control, intimate knowledge, and self-investment as important routes through which such feelings develop, while later work demonstrates that psychological ownership can generate both stewardship-oriented behavior and defensive territoriality. The present study develops an integrated framework connecting psychological ownership of shared digital workspaces with perceived workspace control, shared responsibility, territoriality, team trust, and collaborative contribution. Because no original participant dataset was supplied, a synthetic sample of 450 hypothetical digital-workspace users was generated. Standardized multiple regression and interaction analysis were used to illustrate the proposed relationships. Shared responsibility emerged as the strongest positive predictor of collaborative contribution (β = .364), followed by psychological ownership (β = .337), team trust (β = .241), and workspace control (β = .138). Territoriality showed a substantial negative association (β = −.278), while the psychological ownership × trust interaction was positive (β = .095). The complete model explained 53.1% of simulated variance in collaborative contribution. The findings illustrate a central theoretical argument: psychological ownership in shared digital workspaces is not inherently collaborative or restrictive. When ownership is accompanied by trust, shared responsibility, and clear collaborative control, it can strengthen contribution and stewardship. When psychologically owned resources are treated as personal territories requiring defense, however, the same sense of ownership may discourage openness and knowledge exchange. Evidence from organizational territoriality, virtual communities, virtual teams, and shared augmented-reality research supports this double-edged interpretation.
Keywords	: psychological ownership; shared digital workspaces; collaborative work; territoriality; team trust; knowledge sharing; digital collaboration; virtual teams; shared responsibility; workspace control
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 4, Issue 2, March-April 2023
Published On	2023-03-22

View / Download PDF File

About AJAMIR Fees & Payment Current Issue Publication Archive	Submit Research Paper Track Submission Status Publication Guidelines Publication Ethics Peer Review & Plagiarism	Join as a Reviewer Editors & Reviewers Reviewer Referral Program Get Reviewer Membership Certi.	Website/Journal Policies Usage Policy Content Policies Privacy Policy

Contact Us		+1-872-302-3851	editor@ajamir.com

American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Psychological Ownership in Shared Digital Workspaces

Share this