ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Organ. Psychol.
Sec. Work Motivation and Participation
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/forgp.2025.1678801
This article is part of the Research TopicResignation and Strategic Retention: Shaping the Future WorkforceView all 8 articles
Task Performance and Platform Commitment: The Role of Job Design and Worker Motivation in Microtasking Crowdsourcing
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Work and Organizational Psychology (International Institute of Management), Europa-Universitaet Flensburg, Flensburg, Germany
- 2Department of Computer Science (Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science), Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- 3Discipline of Business Information Systems (Business School), The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
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This study examines how job design and worker motivation shape task performance and platform commitment in microtasking. Microtasking, a form of crowdsourcing in which work is coordinated by Internet platforms and completed in very small units, poses challenges for designing motivating jobs that yield high-quality results. Drawing on the Job Characteristics Model and Self-Determination Theory, we link task and knowledge characteristics, autonomous motivation, and amotivation to quantitative and qualitative performance as well as commitment. We test our model in a free simulation experiment with 558 microtasking workers, combining survey data with objectively assessed performance and self-rated commitment. The analysis shows that while certain job characteristics are positively related to autonomous motivation, unexpectedly, the latter does not mediate their effects on performance or commitment. Instead, amotivation plays the central role: certain task and knowledge characteristics were associated with reduced amotivation, which in turn relates to better performance and higher commitment. This finding indicates that in microtasking, mitigating amotivation is more predictive than fostering autonomous motivation – a significant departure from traditional work motivation theory. The study contributes to theory by highlighting the distinct role of amotivation in platform work and offers practical guidance for designing microtasks that sustain worker engagement and performance.
Keywords: crowdsourcing, Microtasking, Worker motivation, task performance, platform commitment, Job characteristics theory, self-determination theory, free simulation experiment
Received: 03 Aug 2025; Accepted: 17 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Scheel, Mendling and Schlagwein. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Tabea Eleonore Scheel, tabea.scheel@uni-flensburg.de
Daniel Schlagwein, schlagwein@sydney.edu.au
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