Task Characteristics and Participants’ Creative Performance in Crowdsourcing Contexts

Crowdsourcing refers to the use of public power to achieve the specific goals of companies, which is an important source for companies to achieve open innovation. With the rapid development of Internet technologies, companies and individuals increasingly participated in crowdsourcing activities, and the crowdsourcing community is becoming crowded. Numerous submissions by crowdsourcing participants increase the evaluation costs for companies and may be of variable quality. Therefore, improving participants’ creative performance to ensure high-quality submissions has become a key issue for crowdsourcing service providers. In recent years, the application of digital technologies is remodeling the original crowdsourcing mode to optimize the user experience, reflected in the task design. Based on work design theory and self-determination theory, this paper offers a framework to explain how task characteristics affect participants’ creative performance. Specifically, new technologies will strengthen participants’ motivation through three task characteristics—i.e., autonomy, feedback, and diversity—which will subsequently improve participants’ creative performance. We propose to conduct empirical research using a crowdsourcing platform to examine the research model. The findings of our research will be helpful for organizations to draw high quality submissions from crowdsourcing participants.