Aspirations & Obligations: Towards a Theory of Psychological Ownership in Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Psychological ownership is a powerful mental state through which social artifacts such as ideas, inventions, opportunities, and even firms become a part of an entrepreneur’s identity. The experience of owning a venture, however, is not the same for all individuals. While some entrepreneurs feel a passion for their business and see the venture as the means by which they can make a difference in the world, other entrepreneurs feel compelled to start a venture. These fundamental motivational differences between passion and compulsion, in turn, strongly determine the extent to which these entrepreneurs are willing to engage in risk-oriented, creative, transformative actions versus those who seek to maintain the status quo. Linking Self-Discrepancy Theory with prior work on psychological ownership, we investigate how entrepreneurs may possess feelings of ideal or ought psychological ownership. In this study, we develop theory to explain how these different profiles of psychological ownership, along with differ...