Affect and attitudes in the gig economy: a meta-analysis of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers

Purpose This study aims to meta-analyze the relationship between (positive and negative) affect and work attitudes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intentions) for Mechanical Turk (MTurk) data samples. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzed 26 papers containing 31 unique samples consisting of 9,950 MTurkers for positive affect studies and 14,772 MTurkers for negative affect studies. Findings The affect–attitude correlations for each work attitude were stronger for positive affect than for negative affect. The affect–attitude correlations observed in the current study for MTurkers were also stronger than those reported in prior studies for non-MTurkers (like conventional samples, Qualtrics workers and Zoomerang workers). Practical implications Drawing from prior research, we caution that researchers using MTurk samples for their studies might find inflated effect sizes in their results owing to poor data quality in MTurk samples. Originality/value This meta-study analyzed the magnitudes and directions of the affect–attitude relationship for MTurkers. This paper also compared these affect–attitude correlations with those reported in previous studies for traditional samples. A contribution of this research lies in identifying that there may be a presence of halo and horn effects among MTurkers regarding their impressions of positive psychological work concepts.