The Impact of Megaproject Stakeholders’ Psychological Ownership on Cooperative Innovation Performance: Territorial Behavior and Social Loafing as Mediator

Abstract

Megaprojects encounter numerous innovation challenges as well as cross-organization cooperation demands. The paper aims to clarify the relationship between stakeholders’ psychological ownership and cooperative innovation performance. It proposes modelling the behaviors’ mediator process and how and why the megaproject stakeholders’ psychological ownership impacts their cooperative innovation performance. The research aims to expand the domain of psychological ownership by temporary cross-organization aspects and reveal behavioral influence mediation mechanism. This paper opted for an empirical study adapting the SEM approach. Tools such as pre-survey and documentary analysis are applied to design the questionnaire scale. This paper acquired 237 valid questionnaires from seven megaprojects to validate the impact of stakeholders’ psychological ownership on cooperative innovation performance. This paper finds that the following: (1) the psychological ownership of megaproject stakeholders has a negative impact on cooperative innovation performance, which is realized through the dual mediators of territorial behavior and social loafing; (2) psychological ownership has a positive effect on both territorial behavior and social loafing, while territorial behavior and social loafing have a negative effect on cooperative innovation performance. This paper reveals that psychological ownership’s negative influence mechanism on cooperative innovation performance, in temporary cross-organization, further provides support for improving cooperative innovation performance.