From Crowds to

Collaborators: Initiating Effort

and Catalyzing Interactions
Among Online Creative
Workers
by Kevin J. Boudreau, Patrick Gaule, Karim R. Lakhani, Christoph Riedl, and
Anita Williams Woolley

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Online "organizations" are becoming a major

engine for knowledge development in a variety of domains such as
Wikipedia and open source software development. Many online platforms
involve collaboration and coordination among members to reach common
goals. In this sense, they are collaborative communities. This paper asks:
What factors most inspire online teams to begin to collaborate and to do so
creatively and effectively? The authors analyze a data set of 260 individuals
randomly assigned to 52 teams tasked with developing working solutions to
a complex innovation problem over 10 days, with varying cash incentives.
Findings showed that although cash incentives stimulated a significant boost
of effort per se, cash incentives did not transform the nature of the work
process or affect the level of collaboration. In addition, at a basic yet striking
level, the likelihood that an individual chooses to participate depended on
whether teammates were themselves active. Moreover, communications
among teammates led to more communications, and communications
among teammates also stimulated greater continuous levels of effort.
Overall, the study sheds light on how perspectives on incentives,
predominant in economics, and perspectives on social processes and
interactions, predominant in research on organizational behavior and teams,
can be better understood. Key concepts include:

 An individual's likelihood of being active in online collaboration

increases by about 41 percent with each additional active teammate.
Management could provide communications channels to make the
efforts of other members more visible. This is important in the design
of systems for online work as it helps members to confirm that others
are actively contributing.

AUTHOR ABSTRACT
Online collaborative platforms have emerged as a complementary approach
to traditional organizations for coordinating the collective efforts of creative
workers. However, it is surprising that they result in any productive output as
individuals often work without direct monetary incentives while collaborating
with unknown others. In this paper, we distinguish the conditions necessary
for eliciting effort from those affecting the quality of interdependent
teamwork. We consider the role of incentives versus social processes in
catalyzing collaboration. We test our hypotheses using a unique data set of
260 individuals randomly assigned to 52 teams tasked with developing
working solutions to a complex innovation problem over 10 days, with
varying monetary incentives. We find that levels of effort are driven by cash
incentives and the presence of other interacting teammates. The level of
collaboration, by contrast, was not sensitive to cash incentives. Instead,
individuals increased their communication if teammates were also actively
participating. Additionally, team performance is uniquely driven by the level
of emergent interdependence, as indexed by the diversity of topics
discussed and the temporal coordination of activity in short focused time
periods. Our results contribute to the literature on how alternative
organizational forms can be designed to solve complex innovation tasks.

PAPER INFORMATION

Full Working Paper Text

Working Paper Publication Date: January 2014
HBS Working Paper Number: 14-060
Faculty Unit: Technology and Operations Management