Online communities and discontinuance of information technology-enabled on-demand workers: Impacts of informal social interactions through dual commitments

Abstract

The on-demand economy (or gig economy) is touted “the future of work” characterized by heterogeneous laborers “on the cloud.” Turnover intention (TI) models have been developed to describe employees in the conventional settings and thus may be insufficient for understanding on-demand workers. This study aims to fill this important gap and beyond. We derive a model of discontinuance intention (DI) where job satisfaction is a prominent mediator of the effect of reward fairness. We further theorize and test how and why on-demand workers’ dual commitments toward their online communities arising from workers’ informal social interactions (ISI) may create boundary conditions for the mediating role of job satisfaction. Data were collected from a large sample of 1493 on-demand workers over a four-year span and facilitated the analysis of a moderated mediation model. Results indicate that job satisfaction largely mediates a negative relationship between workers’ perceptions that their rewards are just (i.e., fairness of rewards) and their intention to discontinue work for the on-demand firm. Moreover, workers’ dual commitments toward their online peer communities (OPCs) disrupted this mediating effect. More interestingly, the dual commitments did not moderate the mediation path equally. Overall, our theoretical model and empirical results delineate how discontinuance intention can be affected by a parsimonious set of antecedents in the context of the on-demand economy.