Measuring Motivations of Crowdworkers

Abstract

Crowd employment is a new form of short-term and flexible employment that has emerged during the past decade. To understand this new form of employment, it is crucial to illuminate the underlying motivations of the workforce involved in it. This article introduces the Multidimensional Crowdworker Motivation Scale (MCMS), a scale for measuring the motivation of crowdworkers on microtask platforms. The MCMS is theoretically grounded in self-determination theory and tailored specifically to the context of paid crowdsourced microlabor. The scale measures the motivation of crowdworkers along six motivational dimensions, ranging from amotivation to intrinsic motivation. We validated the MCMS on data collected in ten countries and three income groups. Factor analyses demonstrated that the MCMS’s six dimensions showed good model fit, validity, and reliability. Furthermore, our measurement invariance tests showed that motivations measured with the MCMS are comparable across countries and income groups, and we present a first cross-country comparison of crowdworker motivations. This work constitutes an important first step toward understanding the motivations of the international crowd workforce.