The role of psychological ownership in shoplifting prevention: An exploratory study

Despite increased expenditure on traditional approaches to the management and control of retail crime, it continues to increase globally at an exponential rate leading to calls from academics and practitioners alike to explore alternative avenues of retail crime prevention. Focussing on the role of psychological ownership, this study offers empirically generated insights into how employee based, non-technological factors may be developed to prevent and/or deter retail crime through employee intervention behaviours. Adopting a phenomenological approach, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 26 employees across two supermarkets. Findings suggest positive relationships between employees and employers may evoke feelings of possessiveness and psychological ownership towards their place of work among employees. This may have implications on employee propensity to intervene when witnessing deviant in-store customer behaviour. Consequently, retailers should consider identifying and strengthening factors that evoke psychological ownership amongst their employees.