Active Community Participation and Crowdworking Turnover: A Longitudinal Model and Empirical Test of Three Mechanisms

Crowdworkers, such as Mturk workers, face challenging work conditions, including low pay and unfair treatment. To overcome a lack of means to share information with other workers, they often self-organize in independent online communities, for example, TurkerNation. Although prior research has explored both the crowdwork and online community contexts, it has largely ignored crowdworkers' dual-context roles. This research provides evidence for the dual-context phenomenon. We propose three theory-driven mechanisms―embeddedness, cross-influence, and moderated heuristics―that, together with the conventional model and the sequential-update mechanism, explained up to 72% of key behavioral outcomes in both contexts. Moreover, crowdworkers' active participation in online communities had a persistent mitigating effect on their desires to quit working in the crowdworking environment. These findings add to a richer understanding of crowdworkers' integrated and evolving psychology within the dual-context environment. From a managerial perspective, our findings suggest that crowdwork platforms can better retain their workers by facilitating―and actively engaging with―their discussions in an embedded online community.

• 저널Journal of Management Information Systems · 35(4) · 1154–1187
• 토픽Knowledge Management and Sharing · Communication
• DOI10.1080/07421222.2018.1523587
• 저자Xiao Ma, Lara Khansa, Sung S. Kim