The effect of individuals’ work motivation and cognitive flexibility on output quality in a crowdsourcing for ideation context
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2017-09-18
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en
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Abstract
Organizations are increasingly focussed on new product development in order to maintain competitive in the current market. In order to produce high quality innovative products and services, managers apply new tools such as crowdsourcing in order to optimize the ideation process. Where traditional mechanisms such as leadership, resource allocation or job designs are well-researched concepts in literature, individuals’ cognitive traits and motivational orientation showed to be under-examined. The main goal of this research has been to obtain insights in the effect of individuals’ work motivation and cognitive flexibility in crowdsourcing ideation activities on the quality of the generated output. In order to obtain these insights, a study is conducted to examine the intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and cognitive flexibility of contributors on the Philips Open Innovation platform, in relation to the quality of their output
The findings show that individuals’ cognitive flexibility has a positive influence on output quality in an internal crowdsourcing context. This is in line with the argumentation of De Dreu, Baas and Nijstad (2008) and Perry-Smith and Mannucci (2015), who argued that cognitive flexibility facilitates better creative performance in tasks such as idea generation.
In contrast with several studies, for example Ryan and Deci (2000) who argued that intrinsic motivation positively influences individuals’ self-determination and task performance, through the higher amount of effort and dedication towards the task. In this study was found that individuals who are contributing for pleasure, enjoyment, out of interest, to learn or to be challenged do not produce significant higher quality results. Contrasting, significant evidence was found for the negative effect of extrinsic motivation on output quality. Implying that individuals who are contributing in order to gain monetary rewards, promotion, and recognition of superiors or status tend to produce output of lower quality.
Significant evidence was found for the negative effect of extrinsic motivation on Cognitive flexibility. This is in line with prior research of McGraw and Fiala (1982) and Grolnick and Ryan (1985). Individuals’ who exert an extrinsic motivational orientation tend to be less engaged with the task, resulting in lower engagement with the task, which negatively influences individuals’ capability of switching to a different approach or consider a different perspective, using broad and inclusive cognitive categories and holistic processing of information while conducting the task. Significant evidence was also found for the positive effect of intrinsic motivation on cognitive flexibility. Individuals’ who are intrinsic motivated tend to perform better at flexible cognitive processing. Thus, the results indicate that individuals who are intrinsically motivated perform better on cognitive flexible processing capabilities, which results in higher creative performance.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen