Ownership is one of those things organizations want more of.
Such as people who notice problems before they become bigger, who think beyond their immediate responsibilities and who understand that what happens in their department affects someone else.
Yet in many organizations, employees become increasingly focused on their own small part of the work. When something goes wrong between departments, everyone can explain why their part was done correctly. And the business still gets a bad result.
It is easy to look at this and conclude that people simply need to care more.
But ownership is not only an attitude an employee brings to work, the organization itself influences how much ownership people are able and willing to take.
People need to see the business
A person can know their job extremely well without understanding the business particularly well.
They may know what needs to be completed by Friday, which form needs approval or their department target without knowing why that dealine matters, where the approval bottlenecks or how not achieving that target creates a problem somewhere else.
Research on what Boswell and Boudreau describe as employee\’s line of sight is useful here: employees need to understand not only organizational objectives, but how their own work contributes to those objectives.
Harvard Business Publishing makes a related argument around business acumen. Understanding how an organization creates value, responds to customers and makes commercial decisions is increasingly relevant beyond senior leadership. Employees at different levels are making decisions that affect cost, risk and value.
Market orientation follows the same logic. Understanding the customer cannot sit only with Marketing. People across the organization influence whether the customer ultimately receives what the business promised.
If organizations want employees to make better decisions, people need some understanding of how the organization creates value: who the customer is, what matters to that customer, how different functions depend on each other, where money is made or lost, and what the organization is ultimately trying to achieve.
Otherwise, we are asking people to see the whole business while giving them visibility of only one small part of it.
People also learn where their responsibility ends
Organizations teach this, often without realizing it. Constant approvals teach people to wait. Being pulled back after stepping outside a role teaches them to stay within it. Recurring problems that go unresolved eventually stop being raised. And if taking on more responsibility only brings more work, without authority or recognition, people become cautious about stepping forward.
Over time, this can create exactly the behavior leadership later becomes frustrated with: employees who complete their tasks but rarely go beyond them. That is why ownership cannot be separated from the system around the employee.
Ownership is not the same as doing more
This distinction matters particularly when we talk about \”vestir a camisola\”.
There is a healthy version of it: caring about the organization, understanding that everyone\’s work is connected and being willing to contribute when something needs attention. But ownership becomes distorted when it means employees should continuously absorb problems the organization has not solved.
An employee staying late every week because a process is badly designed is not necessarily evidence of strong ownership. Neither is constantly compensating for another department, accepting unclear responsibilities or solving problems without the authority to address their cause.
In fact, genuine ownership may look very different.
It can be the employee who questions a process that is creating unnecessary work, the person who raises a customer problem that leadership has not seen or the manager who looks beyond their own team\’s results and notices the impact those results are having elsewhere.
Or even the employee who says that something is not working before it becomes expensive.
This connects closely with Pierce, Kostova and Dirks\’ work on psychological ownership: the feeling that something is ours or mine, even without legal ownership. Their work identifies experiences such as control, intimate knowledge and investing oneself into something as important routes through which psychological ownership can develop.
In practical terms, it is difficult to feel responsible for something you cannot understand, influence or contribute meaningfully to.
There is also evidence connecting organizational identification, the extent to which people incorporate membership of an organization into how they see themselves, with important work attitudes and behaviors. Riketta\’s meta-analysis, for example, examined these relationships across a substantial body of research.
This doesn\’t mean employees need to make the company their identity. It does suggest something more useful: people\’s relationship with an organization affects how they behave inside it.
So perhaps ownership starts with leadership
Not because employees have no responsibility. They do. But before concluding that people need a stronger ownership mindset, organizations can examine whether the environment makes that mindset useful.
- Do people understand enough of the business to make good decisions?
- Do they understand how their work affects the customer and other teams?
- Is there clarity about where they can act independently?
- Does speaking up lead somewhere?
- Are initiative and collaboration recognized, or only individual output?
- And when someone takes responsibility for a problem beyond their immediate task, what does the organization do with that behaviour?
And perhaps that is the more useful version of vestir a camisola: not carrying more of the organization\’s weight, but understanding enough of the game to know why your position matters.
If ownership, alignment or accountability are becoming difficult in your organization, our Executive Sync creates the space for leadership to understand what is getting in the way, and align on what needs to change.
