Bridgethe Gap!what can work design in crowdworklearn from work designtheories?

Abstract

Integrating crowd-based systems to organizations is highly complex. A major of source of this complexity stems from the nature of organizational work design. Work design and configurations of work performance, in the traditional organizational model, are tightly woven into the structure and functions of organizations, whereas crowdwork leverages an undefined network of people without an organized managerial or hierarchical model. This paper examines work design theories in organizational studies with a view to exploring their potential for addressing the fundamental challenges of work design in organizational crowdwork. Drawing on review of extant literature on crowdwork and analysis of perspectives in work design theories, the paper outlines ways in which crowdsourcing research, on one hand, can interpret and utilize work design theories, and on the other, contribute to redesigning work design theories to keep pace with the important and rapid transformation of work from the traditional staffing paradigm to crowd and open models.