Creativity of participants in crowdsourcing communities: The effects of promotion focus and extrinsic motivation

Organizations can tap the wisdom of the crowd through digital platforms of crowdsourcing for ideation. However, we have limited understanding of factors affecting the innovativeness of ideas and solutions submitted by individual participants. Drawing upon self-determination theory and regulatory focus theory, we investigate how participants' regulatory focus and extrinsic motivation aroused by incentivizing mechanisms affect their creativity in crowdsourcing communities. Based on the data collected from 164 participants in a crowdsourcing platform, we find that promotion focus positively influences participants' creativity, and different types of extrinsic motivation have differential effects. Although external, identified, and integrated motivation positively affect participants' creativity, introjected motivation is not significantly related to participants' creativity. In addition, external and identified motivation strengthen the relationship between promotion focus and creativity. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications of this study are discussed.