Feelings of Pride and Respect as Drivers of Ongoing Member Activity on Crowdsourcing Platforms

ABSTRACT Crowdsourcing platforms are online organizations that organize work by sourcing tasks to their members. As participation on crowdsourcing platforms is completely voluntary, getting members to actively participate in tasks on an ongoing basis is essential for the survival of these online platforms. Why members would be active on an ongoing basis, however, is currently not well understood. To understand ongoing member activity on crowdsourcing platforms, we build on the group engagement model, which postulates that feelings of pride and respect influence engagement because they foster identification with the group. We argue that, although in general the nature of crowdsourcing platforms limits the effects of identification processes on member behaviour, feelings of pride and respect will still play central roles in such online organizations, because feelings of pride and respect can directly drive members’ cooperative behaviors towards the platform organization. Moreover, we posit that the way in which platform organizations communicate with their members affects these feelings of pride and respect. We test these ideas in a longitudinal, multisource field study and find that feelings of pride drive ongoing member activity on an online crowdsourcing platform directly and that platform management can increase members’ feelings of pride and respect by engaging in specific organizational communication practices.