Motivation and Bidding Intention on Crowdsourcing Platforms: A Study of Malaysian Digital Workers

Crowdsourcing has been identified as an emerging industry that can serve as a platform to generate additional income and allow businesses to conduct their operations more innovatively. To ensure the platform’s success, the crowdsourcing system heavily relies on the bidding intention of the crowd’s participation. As a result, it is critical to understand the reasons behind digital workers’ crowdsourcing bid intentions. Nevertheless, much research has been conducted on the motivational factors that influence bid intention in crowdsourcing, either intrinsic or extrinsic factors. Regrettably, past research typically isolates intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors to determine which factors are more significant and impact participation in crowdsourcing. Therefore, this paper aims to provide insight into the relationship’s significance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors. As a result, this paper explains motivational synergy using the stimulus-organisation-response (S-O-R) model. The stimulus-organisation-response (S-O-R) model explains how hedonic pleasure, an intrinsic motivation, affects external motivations (like money and the game-like aspect) and the intention to bid in crowdsourcing. This model explains how the relationship between internal and external motivations can be combined to have the best influence on bidding intention. The model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis by taking an online survey from 129 digital workers who participated in eRezeki, LinkedIn, and Freelancer.com. As hypothesised, hedonic pleasure mediates the relationship between monetary reward and gamification elements with bidding intention, which is significant. Furthermore, monetary reward and gamification elements were found to have a non-significant direct relationship with bid intention. Therefore, this result proves that the synergy between internal and external motivations is important in influencing bid intentions in crowdsourcing.