The Effect of Task Design on Performance and Motivation for New Product Development through Crowdsourcing

Technology related to communication, such as the Internet, has enabled company and customer to interact with each other on a whole new level. Collaboration can be from value for both company and customers. For the company, crowdsourcing has been found to be a great source for new idea generation. The tasks provided to participants in such crowdsourcing contests may differ based on different informational cues. This thesis was an attempt to better understand the perceptions of participants regarding different informational cues in crowdsourcing contest tasks and what the effects may be on performance and intrinsic motivation. An experiment based on a T-shirt design contest was conducted to research the effects of different informational cues. The communication of peers evaluation compared to a jury evaluation has been found to have a positive effect on performance when the contest task includes a relative simple task as coming up with ideas for a new T-shirt design, and intrinsic motivation is found to be accounted for these differences. At the same time, no effect was found in the overall model for sharing the selection (evaluation) criteria throughout the task. But separating the model for males and females to predict performance has shown that selection criteria may have different effects on performance between genders. With that, this thesis complements existing research related to performance, motivations and task characteristics in crowdsourcing contexts and leaves plenty of room to be considered for further research on the perceptions of participants regarding the task in crowdsourcing practices