“What’s the Point of the Task?” Exploring the Influence of Task Meaning on Creativity in Crowdsourcing

Thomas Görzen ()
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Thomas Görzen: University of Paderborn

No 54, Working Papers Dissertations from Paderborn University, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics

Abstract: In pursuit of product innovation, companies increasingly use crowdsourcing for idea generation. Apart from financial motives, previous studies on the motivation of crowd workers identified intrinsic motivation, such as task meaningfulness, to play a key role. These studies, however, focused on routine tasks such as image labelling, using output quantity as the variable of interest. Since the primary goal for a creative task such as idea generation is not abundance but high quality, we investigate the influence of task meaning on workers’ effort and on output creativity. In a field experiment involving idea generation by an online crowdsourcing platform, we vary the task meaning in two different conditions, and evaluate the quality of the ideas generated. We find that higher task meaning has no positive influence on either the quantity or the creativity of the output, which carries practical implications for both commissioners and crowdsourcing platform designers.\\

Keywords: crowd working; task meaning; creativity; crowdsourcing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 L86 M55 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18
Date: 2019-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-ino and nep-pay
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