Antecedents of frustration in crowd work and the moderating role of autonomy

Abstract

This paper identifies antecedents to frustration arising in micro-task crowd work (MTCW) and measures their impact on a frustrating work experience. Surprisingly, research to date has said little on frustration in MTCW, despite it being a central challenge to working persistently in these increasingly important socio-technical work environments. Guided by an experiential computing perspective, we applied a mixed-method approach to reveal how the interplay between platforms and other workers' behavior shapes frustration experienced in MTCW. We present qualitative and quantitative findings on frustration in virtual MTCW. Based on 96 narratives, we qualitatively identify three dominant antecedents to frustration: technical problems in conducting tasks, platform competition and, the inability to disconnect from work. We subsequently conducted a quantitative two-wave survey (N = 181), to test the factors' impacts on MTCW frustration. The results confirm the three factors and additionally reveal that autonomy largely reduces frustration. However, autonomy also reinforces frustration arising from the inability to disconnect from work. Thus, workers' inability to disconnect from work can lure them into excessive availability for taking on additional tasks. Thereby, workers experience additional frustration and underutilize the benefits of autonomy in crowd work. Our manuscript offers three central contributions: First, we identify frustration as pivotal in the experience of MTCW and its antecedents. Second, we shed light on the heterogenous role of autonomy in relation to MTCW frustration. Finally, we link the findings on frustrating MTCW experience to experiential computing.