THE OWNERSHIP GAP — PART TWO From Doing the Job to Owning the Outcome

If Part One establishes that organisations function as interdependent systems, the next question is more difficult: how does a person move from completing a task to taking responsibility for what that task produces?

As a CEO, I would not answer that by simply telling employees to “be more accountable.” Accountability is more complicated than a supervisor checking whether someone has done what they were told.

Mero, Guidice and Werner's field research examined how managerial monitoring relates to employees' perceptions of accountability and subsequent performance. Their work suggests that accountability is not merely an external inspection mechanism; employees' perceptions of being accountable can become part of the pathway through which management practices relate to performance.

But there is an important distinction here.

If I have to chase an employee every afternoon to find out whether a task was completed, I have created a monitoring system. If the employee is already thinking about whether the work achieved its intended result, I have something different.

The first requires surveillance. The second requires internal responsibility.

Chen and colleagues, studying 302 supervisor-employee dyads, similarly found a mediating role for felt accountability in the relationship between leadership and job performance. Their research is useful because it treats accountability as something employees experience, rather than merely something managers impose.

Yet even that needs qualification.

Accountability is not a magic word that automatically produces performance. A 2022 meta-analysis covering seven studies, nine experiments and 1,080 participants found that the effect of outcome-focused versus process-focused accountability depended on task complexity. Outcome accountability was more beneficial for complex tasks, while process accountability was more beneficial for simpler tasks.

That makes practical sense.

If I hire someone to process a standard transaction, there may be a correct procedure that should be followed precisely. But if I give someone a complex business problem, telling them only to follow the procedure may be like telling a surgeon, “Just follow the checklist and don't worry about what is happening to the patient.”

The checklist matters. The patient is the point.

There is also another layer: psychological ownership. A 2025 study of 523 full-time employees in the United States found that psychological ownership was associated with intrapreneurial behaviour, which in turn related to task performance. The study suggests that when employees feel personal attachment and responsibility toward their work, they may be more inclined to act proactively and innovatively.

But I would not want an employee to develop ownership to the point where everything becomes personally theirs. That can become another problem.

Research on 734 employees in the Chinese hotel industry found an inverted-U relationship between psychological ownership and job performance: some ownership was associated with better performance, but excessive ownership could become counterproductive.

That finding matters to me as a CEO.

Ownership should not mean, “Every problem in this organisation is now my personal problem.” It means, “I understand what I have been entrusted with, I understand how my work affects the wider system, and I remain concerned about whether the intended result is achieved.” There is a difference. The human body provides the simplest illustration. Your hand does not become more useful by attempting to become the heart. It becomes useful by performing its own function well while remaining connected to the needs of the whole body.That is what I want from an organisation.

A finance officer should understand how financial decisions affect operations. Operations should understand what customers were promised. Sales should understand what the business can actually deliver. Marketing should understand what the product really does. A manager should understand what their decisions require from the people downstream.

Not everybody needs to do everybody else's work.Everybody needs to understand that their work does not exist in isolation.

There is one final caution for management. Felt accountability can improve performance, but it can also carry a cost. A three-wave study of 294 employees found that felt accountability was associated with both higher task performance and greater emotional exhaustion, with work overload helping explain the latter relationship. So the solution is not to manufacture anxiety and call it ownership.

A healthy organisation should not need employees to be frightened before they care about outcomes.The real goal is integration.

When I look at an organisation, I want to see people who understand their function, understand the system, and understand the consequence of disconnecting the two.

Because a company can survive an individual mistake.

What becomes dangerous is a culture in which everyone can honestly say, “I did my part,” while nobody is asking whether the organisation actually succeeded.

That is the Ownership Gap.

The task belongs to the employee.

The outcome belongs to the organisation.

But the mature employee understands that you cannot reliably protect the second without caring about the first.