ABSTRACT

Firms organize tournaments on online crowdsourcing platforms to outsource complex business problems to external solvers. Participants on these platforms often self-organize into ad-hoc virtual teams to compete in such tournaments. Social dominance-based faultlines, which originate from the alignment of members based on IT-enabled social dominance attributes (e.g., rank and tier), have emerged as a novel type of faultline in crowdsourcing teams. Building on the Categorization-Elaboration Model (CEM), we investigate the contingent effects of team ability and team effort on the relationship between social dominance-based faultlines and team performance in crowdsourcing tournaments. We collected data of 265 virtual teams from Kaggle.com. We discovered that IT-enabled social dominance-based faultlines positively influence the performance of teams with low ability and high effort, whereas the effect becomes negative for teams with high ability and low effort. Our study yields theoretical implications by advancing a novel type of social dominance-based faultline and extending the CEM with two contingent factors (i.e., team effort and team ability) pertinent to team performance on crowdsourcing tournaments. We also offer practical guidelines for team formation in crowdsourcing tournaments and for the design of crowdsourcing platforms.

摘要

公司在在线众包平台上组织比赛，将复杂的业务问题外包给外部解决者。这些平台上的参与者通常会自行组织成临时虚拟团队来参加此类比赛。基于社会优势的断层线源于基于 IT 支持的社会优势属性（例如，等级和等级）的成员对齐，已成为众包团队中的一种新型断层线。基于分类-精化模型 (CEM)，我们研究了团队能力和团队努力对基于社会优势的断层线与众包锦标赛中团队绩效之间关系的偶然影响。我们从 Kaggle.com 收集了 265 个虚拟团队的数据。我们发现 IT 支持的基于社会支配地位的断层线影响低能力和高努力团队的绩效，而对高能力和低努力团队的影响是负面的。我们的研究通过推进一种新型的基于社会支配地位的断层线并利用与众包锦标赛中团队表现相关的两个偶然因素（即团队努力和团队能力）扩展 CEM，从而产生了理论意义。我们还为众包锦标赛中的团队组建和众包平台的设计提供实用指南。