Employee motivation to participate in workplace innovation via in-house crowdsourcing

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has rapidly gained popularity in business and academia. Research on crowdsourcing has focused mostly on the resources external to an organisation, with less attention being paid to in-house crowdsourcing (IHCS). We believe that IHCS has potential to empower employees to partake in workplace innovation. We argue that employee motivation is one of the most significant factors influencing the success or failure of any IHCS project. Yet, to the knowledge of the authors, employee motivation has not been studied in the context of IHCS thus far, and the present study aims to fill this research gap. We present the case of an IHCS project launched by a large Finnish government-owned company (GOC) that offers diversified logistics services. We identify five factors that influence employees’ extrinsic and intrinsic motivation to participate in workplace innovation via IHCS, namely working environment, rewards systems, feedback and processing time, user experience and role of technology, and site marketing and communication. Further, we set several theoretical propositions for empirical testing. Our contribution to workplace innovation literature is two-fold: enhancing the general understanding of IHCS; and studying employee motivation in the IHCS context. We also contribute to the wider innovation management literature by increasing general knowledge about innovativeness of GOCs.