An extremely interesting and unique
characteristic of credit unions (and cooperatives generally) is the
nature of their relationships with their member-owners. While often
understood simply in terms of members' contractual and legal rights,
the movement's history clearly suggests that the ways in which
members conceptualize their relationship to their credit unions can
vary extremely widely between institutions with identical governance
structures. Such differences, in turn, can often exert profound
influence on the developmental paths of different credit unions, and
thus must be understood as driven by subjective, rather than
structural, factors. One such dynamic that that I've found
particularly useful and compelling when considering credit union
development is something I've come to refer to as "ownership
salience."
By this I mean, simply, the intensity
with which a credit union member psychologically and behaviorally
internalizes the fact that he or she owns their credit union. When
ownership salience is entirely lacking, members simply treats their
relationship with their credit union relationship as identical in
kind to the customer relationship with a bank or other non-member
owned business. This sort of person is a credit union member simply
because it is the most attractive option on the market, and, when
thinking about their institution, he or she uses the pronouns "they"
and/or "it" (as in, "They made a donation to the food
shelf"). If such a person has a negative experience, their
natural response is no different than it would be at a bank: take
their business elsewhere.
