Competition matters! Self-efficacy, effort, and performance in crowdsourcing teams

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Kwasi Amoako-Gyampah, Professor and Department Head (Creator)
Indika Dissanayake (Creator)
Nikhil Mehta, Assistant Professor (Creator)
Prashant Palvia, Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor and Director of the McDowell Research Center for Global IT Management (Creator)
Vasyl Taras, Associate Professor (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/

Abstract: Advances in information technologies (IT) have enabled organizations to seek solutions for their business problems from beyond their own workforce through digital crowdsourcing platforms. In the most common form of crowdsourcing, teams that offer solutions compete for rewards. Thus, a question of interest is whether competition is a key crowdsourcing characteristic that influences how teams allocate their effort and achieve desired performance. Motivated by this question, we investigate how competition moderates the relationship between self-efficacy and effort using comprehensive, time-variant data collected from crowdsourcing teams that completed a project under competitive and non-competitive conditions. Under competitive conditions, self-efficacy shows a positive effect on effort, which in turn, affects performance positively. Whereas, under noncompetitive conditions, self-efficacy has a negative effect on effort and subsequently on performance. Our results also show a recursive relationship between self-efficacy and performance, in which performance subsequently affects self-efficacy positively. Thus, inducing a sense of competition through competitive reward structures and IT-based “gaming elements” helps improve team effort and subsequent performance. We also tested for mediation of team motivation in the self-efficacy and effort relationship, and we found that motivation partially mediates the relationship. Based on our findings, implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

Additional Information

Publication
Information and Management, 56(8), 103158
Language: English
Date: 2019
Keywords
Crowdsourcing, Competition, Self-efficacy theory, Control theory, Social comparison, Gamification

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