Motivating Employees to Crowdsource

Although there is greater adoption of crowdsourcing, relatively little is known about internal crowdsourcing (ICS). Since there are key differences between ICS, and external crowdsourcing (ECS) and user-generated content (UGC) endeavors within organizations, a deeper understanding of what motivates employees to contribute is crucial to ICS success. Altruism is often cited as an attribute motivating employees to engage in self-initiated voluntarism. While employees engaged in a firm-initiated ICS exercise are also likely to be driven by their altruistic tendencies, identifying factors beyond altruism holds the key to realizing greater employee contribution. The authors draw from theories in job design to develop a research framework that includes three high-level dimensions of non-altruistic motivations: work-directed, task-directed, and self-directed. Using language translation as ICS task, we conduct an empirical study to appraise a set of hypotheses using data collected from IBM. Results support all hypotheses except one. Managerial and research implications are discussed.