Understanding Job Satisfaction of Crowd Workers: An Empirical Analysis of Its Determinants and Effects

Crowd work has emerged as new pattern of digitally mediated collaboration. In this paper, we focus on the determinants and effects of crowd workers’ job satisfaction – a perspective that has been largely neglected by current crowdsourcing research. We report results from a survey of 161 crowd workers participating in crowdsourced software testing. Our research shows that job satisfaction mediates the effects of monetary rewards, hedonic value, and cognitive stimulation on the intention to participate in future testing tasks. By contrast, factors of work context (i.e., flexibility and provided information) have no effects. We contribute to the literature by unraveling job satisfaction as causal mechanism influencing future participation. For practice, our results help to design more effective tasks in crowd work.