Building trust to create crowdsourcing acceptance

Abstract

Organisations aspire to access human capital that provides competitive advantage. Historically, organisations looked internally to access these resources. With technology and entrenched penetration of the ‘internet’ this aspiration has crossed the boundaries of organisations. The incentive for crowdsourcing for the employers can be attributed to strategic and economic rationale however for the crowd workers the incentives seems elusive. This paper proposes a conceptual model to understand the motivation of crowds to opt for crowdsourcing at the level of the organisation. We propose the firm size and reputation of an organisation leads to trust amongst the crowdsourcing community, moderating the relationship between participation in crowdsourcing and acceptance in the community. Our model is supported by the Exchange Theory.