The role of psychological ownership and ownership markers in collaborative working environment.

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we present a study concerning psychological ownership for digital entities in the context of collaborative working environments. In the first part of the paper we present a conceptual framework of ownership: various issues such as definition, effects, target factors and behavioral manifestation are explicated. We then focus on ownership marking, a behavioral manifestation that is closely tied to psychological ownership. We designed an experiment using DiamondTouch Table to investigate the effect of two of the most widely used ownership markers on users' attitudes and performance. Both performance and attitudinal differences were found, suggesting the significant role of ownership and ownership markers in the groupware and interactive workspaces design.