To Share or Not to Share: Measuring Knowledge Sharing Motivations in a Crowdsourcing Environment

Crowdsourcing has been an emergent social concept which highlights the participative culture and collective intelligence of the crowd towards accomplishing a task. Initiated via an open call from a sponsor, either a person or an organization, crowdsourcing tasks are increasingly being employed because of the benefits that crowdsourcing could bring—which include savings on time and internal resources, as well as wider and more flexible reach to potential human laborers. Because of the newness of the phenomenon, research communities have gained increasing interests to better understand crowdsourcing and to contribute to the sparse crowdsourcing literature. In addition, because engaging the community is a crucial factor for the success of crowdsourcing, measuring the determinants that motivate crowds to participate and share their knowledge is a top priority for crowdsourcing organizations. The objective of this study, therefore, is to develop a new measurement scale for a proposed construct of interest: “motivation to share knowledge in a crowdsourcing environment.” We examined this construct by investigating the interrelationship among related constructs present within the study’s nomological network. Specifically, we applied correlation and regression analyses techniques to test ten hypothesized relationships using data gathered from Amazon Mechanical Turk—a popular example of an online marketplace for crowdsourcing on-demand tasks that is capable of reaching out to a global work force. Our results indicate strong support for the validity and reliability of the proposed construct