A meta‐analysis of the Big Five traits, organizational citizenship behavior, and counterproductive work behavior in Mechanical Turk workers

Abstract Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an online data collection platform that has gained popularity in the recent past among social science researchers. Even with such an increasing presence of MTurk samples in behavioral management studies, a deeper understanding of MTurkers as actual workers is largely lacking in literature. Our research meta‐analyzed the effects of MTurkers' Big Five personality traits and age on their organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and counterproductive work behavior (CWB) using 14 papers that contained 19 samples with an overall sample size of 7603 MTurkers. Findings revealed that MTurker openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness were all positively related to OCB, whereas openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, and agreeableness were negatively related to CWB and MTurker neuroticism had a positive association with their CWB. Additionally, MTurker age had significant moderating effects on conscientiousness–OCB, extraversion–OCB, and agreeableness–OCB such that for extraversion, younger MTurkers reported a stronger positive correlation than older MTurkers and for conscientiousness and agreeableness, older MTurkers reported a stronger positive correlation than younger MTurkers. MTurker age also had significant moderating effects on neuroticism–CWB. A contribution of this research is that MTurker personality traits do influence their OCB and CWB similar to the trait–behavior relationship for organizational employees. We discuss the theoretical and methodological contributions for management research and practical implications of this study for Amazon and survey recruiters on the MTurk platform.