It’s often said that there is no I in team, but teams are nonetheless only effective if everyone is pulling in the same direction.  New research from the University of East Anglia highlights how individuals need to feel personal ownership towards the goals of the team in order to give their best.

As you can perhaps imagine, encouraging individual ownership has to be carefully balanced, as it can easily encourage individual actions that reduce collective effectiveness.

The crux of the research explored two forms of psychological ownership: the personal and the collective.  Or in other words, the perception that a project was mine, or a project was ours.  How did these two forms of ownership influence the way both individuals and the team approached team work.

Ownership

The results suggest that collective psychological ownership can indeed have a positive impact on engagement and creativity of the team, it’s personal psychological ownership that largely drives our individual engagement and creativity.  Unfortunately, this personal ownership has the opposite effect on team outcomes.

“Human nature to possess can be a powerful motivation to enhance employee engagement and creativity,” the researchers say.  “Managers should invest time in making each team member feel like a project owner to maximize individual outputs, but equally focus on teams developing a feeling of collective ownership, ‘our project’ rather than ‘my project’, if they expect higher team dedication and more creative project outcomes. Without team members experiencing collective ownership, there is a risk that team performance will be lost.”

From an individual perspective, team members should strive to be aware of the importance of psychological ownership as a driving force behind engagement and performance in a group environment.  They need to have the personal drive to contribute, whilst also being conscious of the collective good of the team.

“It may sound trite, but a team is more than just a collection of individuals. When team members only think of themselves as individually owning the project without collective ownership, then creativity drops. There has to be an ‘us’ as well as an ‘I’ in a successful team,” the researchers continue.