Why Is Your Crowd Abandoning You? : Exploring Crowdsourcing Discontinuance through the Lens of Motivation Theory

A typical crowdsourcing platform connects organisations in need for workforce to individuals willing to work for a compensation. Considering that a motivated crowd constitutes a vital resource of such platforms, nurturing it becomes a crucial managerial consideration. Yet, little is known of why individual workers abandon crowdsourcing platforms after long periods of usage. Therefore, we set out to explore how crowd-workers’ motivations change during a platform’s usage lifecycle, from initial usage, to continued use, to its eventual abandonment. To this end, we conducted an in-depth qualitative inquiry into a popular crowdsourcing platform in the software-testing domain. Leveraging self-det…