Most leaders want employees who are engaged, invested, and accountable. Yet many organizations struggle with the same frustrating pattern: Carefully designed initiatives are rolled out, leadership is aligned, resources are allocated, yet employee buy-in still falls flat.
Behavioral science offers a helpful explanation for why this happens. It’s known as the IKEA Effect.
What the IKEA Effect Is
The IKEA Effect is a cognitive bias in which people place disproportionately higher value on things they helped create themselves. The term comes from research showing that people who assembled IKEA furniture, made origami, or built LEGO sets, were willing to pay more for their creations than for pre-built versions.
When people invest labor into creating something, they develop a sense of psychological ownership; the work becomes “mine” since effort has been spent bringing it into existence. This effect is tied to behavioral concepts like effort justification and identity reinforcement, where our brains use effort as a signal that something must be valuable.
How it shows up at work
In organizational settings, the IKEA Effect appears anytime employees are asked to adopt goals, processes, or changes they had no hand in shaping. No matter how sound the initiatives might be, employees may disengage if they don’t feel any sense of ownership. Treating employees as recipients rather than contributors prevents psychological ownership from forming. Engagement becomes something that must be managed rather than sustained.
On the flip side, employees involved in shaping initiatives, even in small and structured ways, are more likely to support and sustain them. Research and applied workplace studies show that participation increases commitment, accountability, adaptability, and long-term adoption of change.
This is why engagement strategies relying solely on communication, incentives, or enforcement often underperform. They focus on compliance rather than ownership.
Designing a system that works
Many employers worry that employee involvement will slow execution or surface disagreement, which can happen if input is requested too late or too broadly. For some leaders, that feels risky.
Excluding employees from the early stages of problem definition tends to create resistance that shows up later on, costing more time and energy than early, structured participation.
A more effective approach is to involve employees upstream, where insight is most valuable, and disruption is lowest. Early pushback provides valuable information. It surfaces friction and unintended consequences before they become costly problems. If leaders provide context around constraints and non-negotiables, input becomes more focused and useful.
This means inviting contributions during:
- Problem definition (What’s actually getting in the way?)
- Constraint identification (What will break if we change this?)
- Implementation design (How will this work day-to-day?)
Addressing tension early and constructively is what allows alignment to form. Once direction is set, execution should move quickly. Here, you’re aiming for overall alignment, not agreement.
Does involvement mean giving up control?
Another common concern is that involving employees means handing over decision authority or diluting leadership accountability. But ownership and authority are not the same thing.
Effective involvement systems make a clear distinction:
- Leadership owns direction, priorities, and trade-offs
- Employees own insight, application, and execution
When decision rights are explicit, involvement strengthens leadership and builds trust without creating ambiguity.
What if my team is already disengaged?
Many organizations have tried engagement initiatives before, like surveys, listening sessions, and other forms of feedback, only to see little follow-through. Over time, this creates skepticism and participation fatigue.
Structure makes the difference.
Ownership scales as involvement is repeatable and connected to outcomes. Employees don’t need endless opportunities to weigh in. They need to see that contributions and effort lead to visible change. You can generate this trust by following up and sharing:
- "What did we hear?”
- “What changed?”
- “What didn’t change, and why?”
If people see that their input has weight, even selectively, participation will become meaningful.
Let them build!
Organizations need employees who think like owners, not just executors. Co-creation shifts employees from passive consumers of decisions to active contributors in the process. Build a system that intentionally designs moments where employees can:
- Help define the problem
- Contribute to solution design
- Test and refine approaches
- Provide feedback that meaningfully influences outcomes
People seeing their fingerprints on a solution makes them more likely to defend it, improve it, and see it through, even as challenges arise. Have employees help build the systems they’re asked to use, and engagement becomes a natural outcome of how work gets done.
Content provided by Q4intelligence
Photo by auremar