مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The value of using non-employee work has increasingly become recognized as a viable businessstrategy for organizations.One method of using non-employee work that has received significant recent attention is crowdsourcing, which has been defined as employing information technologies to outsource business tasks and responsibilities to Internet-based crowds of individuals (Prpic, Shukla, Kietzmann, & McCarthy, 2015). Crowdsourcing utilizesthe skills and expertise of people online to engage in organizationalfunctions or parts thereof that can be done more effectively or less costly by non-employees. There are Internet users that possess relevant skills for organizational needs, yet who are best contracted for individual tasks rather than permanent or full-time employment relationships (Aguinis & Lawal, 2013). The Internet facilitates this sharing of work with such workers and its transmission back to organizations. We focus here on compensated crowdsourcing, which we define as crowdsourcing situations in which individuals performing the work receive some sort of payment for accomplishing the organization’s tasks.

Prpic et al. (2015) and Ford, Richard, and Ciuchta (2015) offer important initial specification of the nature of crowdsourcing and the internal organizational needs to sustain crowdsourcing initiatives. This article builds on these works by focusing attention on characteristics of sites that provide crowds and the nature of how workers participate in such sites. In discussing such applications, the authors draw on the existing literature base as well as personal experiences as workers on such sites.

This article begins by describing the general characteristics of crowdsourcing sites and providing examples drawn from them. We then discuss the wide variety of tasks that have been accomplished via such sites, drawing on the categories proposed by Prpic et al. (2015). The article then moves into discussing the characteristics of significant online communities that have developed around the sites and how they impact worker engagement with particular tasks and companies offering such tasks. Finally, we draw all these elements together in offering practical considerations for organizational use of such crowdsourcing sites.