A Mixed Method Approach to Understanding Crowdsourcees' Engagement Behavior

With an increasing amount of arising crowdsourcing initiatives, insights are needed on how to successfully drive initial and sustained platform-activity, as a form of value cocreation between crowdsourcer and crowdsourcees. Therefore, the engagement concept, known as a micro-foundation of value co-creation, serves to holistically understand crowdsourcees’ psychological and behavioral responses along the IT-mediated crowdsourcing journey. Due to the multidimensionality of the concept, a mixed method approach is proposed for exploring qualitatively and quantitatively stimuli’s effect on psychological states and engagement behaviors. Therefore, two measuring approaches, the Sequential Incident Laddering Technique and a Panel Poisson Model, are presented. Preliminary findings suggest that, next to other factors, crowdsourcer-interaction and high-effort tasks serve as dominant drivers, fostering psychological engagement beyond the interaction process, while crowd-interaction rather drives within-process engagement behavior. This research in progress provides IS-researchers and practitioners initial insights into IT-enabled value co-creation processes.