It’s mine, I decide what to change: the role of psychological ownership in employees’ process innovation behaviour

Employees play a major role in enabling organizations to innovate their processes. While conditions for participation have to be established, barriers have to be lowered and trainings take place, the motives of employees to participate in incremental and discontinuous process innovation are not well understood. One important soft factor not addressed yet sufficiently is psychological ownership of non-managerial employees that can contribute to increase process innovation activities. We apply a multi-time survey design gathering quantitative data which is analysed with structured equation modelling. The findings suggest that psychological ownership is important in fostering innovation behaviour with incremental innovation behaviour being an important mediator for the effect on radical innovation behaviour. We show how psychological ownership is useful in fostering process innovation behaviour with data from the financial services sector. Organisations should invest in establishing psychological ownership on the level of operations to increase process innovation.