Justice for the Crowd: Organizational Justice and Turnover in Crowd-Based Labor

Xiaochuan Song,Graham H Lowman,Peter Harms

doi:10.3390/admsci10040093

Xiaochuan Song, Graham H Lowman + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci10040093

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Abstract

Crowd-based labor has been widely implemented to solve human resource shortages cost-effectively and creatively. However, while investigations into the benefits of crowd-based labor for organizations exist, our understanding of how crowd-based labor practices influence crowd-based worker justice perceptions and worker turnover is notably underdeveloped. To address this issue, we review the extant literature concerning crowd-based labor platforms and propose a conceptual model detailing the relationship between justice perceptions and turnover within the crowd-based work context. Furthermore, we identify antecedents and moderators of justice perceptions that are specific to the crowd-based work context, as well as identify two forms of crowd-based turnover as a result of justice violations: requester and platform turnover. In doing so, we provide a novel conceptual model for advancing nascent research on crowd-based worker perceptions and turnover.

Highlights

Organizations are faced with an ever-growing challenge to acquire human resources (Chambers et al 1998)
Given distributive justice perceptions are directly linked to instrumental outcomes, we suggest that workers who are more extrinsically motivated will have a stronger response to distributive justice violations due to compensation policy issues than workers who are more internally motivated
By seeing crowdwork from an evaluation perspective, tasks can be evaluated by either rule-based evaluation, which uses universally accepted knowledge and objective rules for evaluation, or case-based evaluation, which is based on the requester’s subjective rules and accumulated experience. By comparing these two types of evaluation, we suggest that participative performance evaluations, which invite workers to be a part of the performance evaluation, are likely to have a stronger influence on procedural justice perceptions for case-based evaluations as they are generally more subject to requesters’ discretionary judgment instead of universal rules, making workers’ participation more important when ensuring fairness and consistency of performance evaluations

Summary

Introduction

Organizations are faced with an ever-growing challenge to acquire human resources (Chambers et al 1998). We contribute to crowd-based labor literature by detailing the nature of this new human resource acquisition technique and discussing the implications of its application for perceptions and behaviors of working individuals within crowd-based labor. We accomplish this by employing an organizational justice framework, which refers to individuals’ perceptions and attitudes toward policies, practices, and activities that are initiated and implemented within an organization

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