Pathways to Meaningful Work on Micro-Task Crowdsourcing Platforms

In this paper we investigate different mechanisms for meaningful work on micro-task crowdsourcing platforms. We adapt the pathways to meaningful work framework from the organizational behavior literature to build a theoretical model in the context of micro-task crowdsourcing. We conduct a field study with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers on a simulated crowdsourcing platform to test the research model. Our results show that motivations to connect with the self (self-connection pathway) and others (unification pathway) form two major paths to meaningful work on these platforms. Our findings contribute to the work meaningfulness research in information systems and confirm that how workers derive meaning on micro-task crowdsourcing platforms that center on the information technology (IT) artifact is comparable to traditional organizational settings