Why Individuals Participate in Micro-task Crowdsourcing Work Environment: Revealing Crowdworkers’ Perceptions

Advancements in Internet and digital technologies have enabled a new work form of open sourcing, which we refer to as the crowdsourcing work environment (CSWE). This new form of work has the potential to disrupt and transform the nature of traditional work. However, our understanding of this new work form is still in its incipient stage. To enhance our understanding, this study captures crowdworkers’ perceptions to explore the characteristics of the crowdworkers, crowdsourcing jobs, and the crowdwork environment that collectively drive the crowdworkers to participate in open source work. Guided by the job characteristic theory and work value perspectives, we used the revealed causal mapping method to analyze narratives by 55 crowdworkers registered on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Our data analysis uncovered nine main constructs, 22 key concepts, and 815 causal-effect linkages surrounding CSWE that could guide our theoretical understanding of this emerging phenomenon. Individual needs and the crowdwork context emerged as the major factors motivating individuals’ initial participation in CSWE, but we found crowdsourcing task characteristics (e.g., job autonomy, task variety, task significance, task instruction, and task compensation) and a digitally enabled environment (e.g., system affordance and MTurk governance) to shape crowdworkers’ continued participation in CSWE. The findings suggest several promising research streams, including the psychological factors (i.e., personal growth needs and work values) and social outcomes (i.e., empowerment or exploitation of crowdworkers) for examining the psychology and sociology of crowdsourcing work.