Psychological Ownership and Citizens Engagement in Government Social Media Services: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Governments need to engage citizens, the ultimate stakeholders, in
governmental process to improve the quality of public service. To that end,
social media platforms, these days, opened up opportunities for governments to
establish effective and interactive communications with their citizens on almost
real time basis. However, not all governments are succeeding in extracting
desired benefits from the interactive trait of social media to increase
engagement with citizens. To examine what factors motivate citizens to
effectively engage in interaction with the government in its social media
platform, this research puts forward a new construct namely, psychological
ownership of a social media window. The hypotheses have been tested by
analyzing data from an online survey conducted amongst 269 facebook users of
Bangladesh Government’s a2i (Access to Information: a program responsible
for implementing e-government initiatives in Bangladesh) facebook page. The
analysis finds strong positive relationship between citizen’s psychological
ownership of Government’s social media window and his/her active engagement
with it. The outcome of the study gives cue to government organizations about
the importance of paying due attention and strategizing social media services in
a way that would create feeling of psychological ownership of citizens.