A Cross-Country Comparison of Crowdworker Motivations

Introduction. Crowd employment is a new form of short term employment that has been rapidly becoming a source of income for a vast number of people around the globe. It differs considerably from more traditional forms of work, yet similar ethical and optimization issues arise. One key to tackle such challenges is to understand what motivates the international crowd workforce. In this regard, we study one particularly prevalent type of crowd employment: micro-tasks. So far, the motivation of micro-task crowdworkers has mainly been investigated on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) (e.g. [6, 7, 5]). Consequently, research has focused on workers from the USA and India, which constitute the main population on AMT [4]. This work, in contrast, addresses crowd employment as an increasingly international phenomenon by exploring the more workforce-diverse micro-task platform CrowdFlower1. Furthermore, questionnaires for measuring motivations should be carefully adapted and tested if they are to be used in these new and culturally diverse work environments, in order to produce interpretable results. To this end, we developed a novel scale that marks a major step in reliably measuring the motivations driving micro-task participation around the world, and we report on the results of applying this scale, which unveil significant international differences. The Multidimensional Crowdworker Motivation Scale. The Multidimensional Crowdworker Motivation Scale (MCMS) [8] is theoretically grounded in Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and builds mainly on two motivation scales developed for the traditional work context: WEIMS [9] and MWMS [3]. The stem question of the MCMS is “Why do you or would you put efforts into doing CrowdFlower tasks?”, adapted from MWMS [3] in order to capture both actual and latent motivations. SDT specifies different types of motivation [1, 2], based on which we adopted the following six constructs for the MCMS: Amotivation refers the absence of motivation, a state of acting passively or not intending to act all. Individuals motivated by external regulation act in order to obtain rewards or avoid punishments. We divided this construct into material external regulation and social external regulation. Another type of motivation is introjected regulation, which aims at the avoidance of guilt or at attaining feelings of worth.