User Creativity in Crowdsourcing Community: from extrinsic Motivation Perspective

Lack of creative ideas is always the biggest challenge that firms are facing in their innovative activity (Leimeister et al. 2009), and firms are increasing use crowdsourcing to capture diversity ideas from external people. Unfortunately, these crowdsourcing activities can sometime lead to ideas with less creativity than those ideas generated by internal employees (Blohm et al. 2011; Boudreau 2012; Leimeister et al. 2009). This research investigates the effect of users’ extrinsic motivation on idea creativity within the crowdsourcing community. Based on self-determination theory, we propose that four types of extrinsic motivation will positively affect the creativity of ideas generated by crowdsourcing community. Through a survey of 202 participants in China biggest crowdsourcing community, we find our research model is generally supported. We further observe the significant moderating effects of promotion focus on the relationship between extrinsic motivation and creativity. Our research provides both theory and practice implications