Working on Low-Paid Micro-Task Crowdsourcing Platforms: An Existence, Relatedness and Growth View

Low-paid micro-task crowdsourcing sites present a new workplace that has been increasingly popular. Given recently reported crowd demographics and relevant literature we believe that the understanding of higher-level motivations for workers on these sites is still an under-explored area. Using a qualitative research methodology, we explore workers’ motivations in their natural settings. We conduct interviews with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and analyze the data through the lens of Alderfer’s existence, relatedness, and growth theory. Our paper contributes new insights to the crowdsourcing literature, specifically that low-paid micro-task crowdsourcing workers aim to satisfy relatedness (connectedness and societal impact), existence (income, basic rights and rewarding experience), and growth needs (impact on self and skill development). We also discuss three additional categories that emerge from our data: sense of control and power, having fun and passing the time. Our findings provide new contributions that are of high relevance to both theory and practice.