Internal idea contests;
a motivational perspective of
embeddedness
Abstract
Using an experimental setup with scenarios and a survey, this research aims to find out what motivates employees to enter into an internal idea contest. The research distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic motivational perspectives. The scenarios were used to prime participants to a perspective of embeddedness into a fictional company that sent out the competition. Main findings are that monetary rewards are not as highly valued by employees as might be expected. On the other hand, “autonomy” in the competition and “getting a good feeling” from participating were scored the highest by the participants. Another interesting finding was that there is no significant difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors. There were only small significant effects between the participants that received different treatments of the embeddedness perspective, but where it did, people that were strategically embedded were generally less motivated than those who are more in touch with the day-to-day workings of the company.
By Tim van de Scheur Semester 2 2014-2015 Supervisor R. Drogendijk Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Faculty of Economics and Business
Table of contents
Abstract ... 1 Table of contents ... 2 Introduction ... 3 Literature ... 6 Methodology ... 14 Analysis ... 22 Results ... 29 Additional Data ... 34 Conclusion ... 36 Managerial implications ... 37Limitations and avenues for further research ... 39
Appendices ... 41
Appendix 1 – References ... 41
Appendix 2 – Questions ... 47
Appendix 3 – Scenarios ... 49
Introduction
A popular way for companies to get innovative new ideas or other forms of input is to set out a Crowdsourcing Contest (Adamczyk, Bullinger & Möslein, 2012). In these contests big companies like Procter and Gamble or Siemens (Schepers & Schnell, 1999) use platforms like Innocentive or freelancer.com to set out competitions to an online community (http://www.innocentive.com/). These websites have members, so called solvers, who enter these contests and try to find a solution and eventually ‘win’ the contest. And their effort is not in vain, it is estimated that the competition industry has a value of over one billion US dollars (McKinsey, 2009). A nice feature of these contests is that they look beyond traditional company boundaries. Anyone with a good idea can participate and has a chance to win the contest.
What companies are also realizing is that there is a lot of untapped (creative) potential within the company itself as well. For this reason, companies sometimes set up these kinds of contests within the company, so the employees are asked to contribute their ideas to a problem or issue. An obvious reason for a set up like this is the familiarity of the employees with the company allowing for a wider variety of questions to be asked (Leung, van Rooij & van Deen, 2014). It would make more sense to ask employees for ideas concerning strategies or in-house initiatives like CSR practices, instead of a random crowd. To make a clear distinction between a contest set out to an online community, and a contest designed for the employees of a company, the former will be called an external contest, and the latter an internal contest in line with the terminology used in the article of Leung and colleagues (2014).
Knowledge in companies
lot of information and that there is a constant trouble of getting the right information to the right place at the right time.
A seemingly easy way to get the right information might be to just ask. If a company needs specific knowledge or input on an issue or wants to foster innovation, they might set up a platform that allows the company to gather the needed input. A tried and tested way of gathering input is crowdsourcing, defined by Howe (2006) as “everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R&D”. Of course this might not be the best approach for every issue a company faces, but when a company specifically wants its members input, setting up a crowdsourcing platform, or even an internal contest might be a good idea. This platform would allow every employee anywhere in the company to share their input, possibly overcoming the boundaries of the physical company.
To make sure the knowledge is effectively distributed in the company, several factors have been identified that foster this distribution (Nonaka, 1994). Examples of these factors are autonomy, redundancy, intention and individual commitment. More recently, there have been many studies on the external crowdsourcing contests. These studies had varying goals, e.g. finding out how to set up the best contest (Haichao, Dahui & Wenhua, 2011) or finding determinants of success and participation (Hsien-Tung & Bagozzi, 2014, Khasraghi & Aghaie, 2014, Haichao et. al., 2011, Jeppesen & Frederiksen, 2006). All of these researches have focused on a contest set out to an online community of anonymous participants and have focused on general aspects of contests, not any specific forms of motivation.
Internal Crowdsourcing and Motivation
A lot of research has been done on people’s motivation to enter external competitions (Hsien-Tung & Bagozzi, 2014, Khasraghi & Aghaie, 2014, Haichao et. al., 2011, Jeppesen & Frederiksen, 2006). However the research into internal competitions has been focused on evaluating competitions and their outcomes (e.g. Leung et. al. 2014) or identifying some general success factors (e.g. Schepers & Schnell, 1999, Santos & Spann, 2011). These papers are case studies, written mainly by employees and stakeholders of the company that set up the internal contest. Although these researchers have mentioned the participant’s motivation they have not specifically focused their research on it. This leads us to the following research question:
What motivational factors influence an employees’ intention to participate in an internal crowdsourcing contest?
A MNE is not just one company in one location, with just a few employees. They have many offices in many locations. Given that there is a distinct difference between employees in different parts of a MNE, the question arises if these people in different places are motivated differently too. Alpander and Carter (1991) have found that there is indeed a difference in motivation between employees within a MNE. In their work on ASEAN subsidiaries, Putti, Shapiro & Kang (1984) even found a significant difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of employees, which is one of the distinctions this article will also adopt. To find out if these motivational differences hold for internal contests, the second question this paper aims to answer is:
Does an employees’ position in the company have an influence on his/her motivation to participate?
understanding of what motivates people to work on a contest like this and the factors that might influence this motivation. The research also provides an insight into how important factors like the relations with the corporate headquarter are for subsidiary employees. The insights gained on the motivational aspects of employee participation in an internal competition could also help practitioners set up a more effective internal contest, and give a clearer image of employee’s motivations in general, and subsidiary employees in particular.
Contents of the paper
The following part of the paper will explain the theory that is the foundation of this article. Next, the methods used to perform the research will be explained. After the methods the results of the research will be presented, followed by a discussion of these results, including the limitations, managerial implications and possible avenues of future research.
Literature
Aspects of employee motivation
The theories on motivation in general (Ryan, & Deci, 2000, Amabile, 1993) and on motivation in crowdsourcing competitions in particular (Haichao et. al. 2011, Schepers & Schnell, 1999) both make a clear distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In order to be able to categorize and interpret the results of this research this distinction will be used here too. In line with the work of Amabile (1993) the following definitions will be used: “Individuals are intrinsically motivated when they seek enjoyment, interest, satisfaction of curiosity, self-expression or personal challenge in their work. Individuals are extrinsically motivated when they engage in the work in order to obtain some goal that is apart from the work itself” (Amabile, 1993).
So when the motivation comes from the job itself, an individual is intrinsically motivated, for example complexity of the task, or the variety from someone’s day job. If his motivation to do the task is a means to an external end he is extrinsically motivated (Amabile, 1993, Amabile et. al, 1994). Examples of extrinsic rewards are monetary rewards, or recognition from coworkers and management. Though usually it is a mix of these factors (Zamecnik, 2014), this article hopes to find out which part of this mix is the most important in internal competitions.
When this intrinsic / extrinsic distinction is translated to a crowdsourcing contest framework, it means that the participants can be motivated intrinsically, so by the task posed by the competition itself, or extrinsically, by a reward received for completing the task, a monetary reward, or a non-monetary reward like recognition and praise for the effort they have put in.
H1: Intrinsic rewards gained by working on an internal competition are more important in employee motivation to participate in internal competitions than extrinsic rewards.
From earlier research on motivation in general, and motivation in competitions, a number of indicators have been identified that embody intrinsic or extrinsic motivation and that are deemed important to this research. An overview of these factors is presented below, the first five indicators represent intrinsic factors, and the second set are the extrinsic factors.
Intrinsic Factors
The first of the intrinsic factors is autonomy. Autonomy is derived from the work of Sims et al. (1976) and is defined as the possibility to spend time on the contest, whilst on the job. Another part of autonomy is going to be included in the extrinsic part, where the opportunity to be able to continue to work on the idea after it has been chosen as a winner of the contest is one of the possible extrinsic motivators. Without the autonomy to participate in a competition, it is very unlikely for a person to be motivated to enter the competition seeing it has to be done in his or her own time. Variety is the next factor, and it is taken from the works of Coehlo & Augusto (2008). Variety in this research context means the difference between solving the contest and the work the person usually does. It will also look at the different skills needed to solve the contest, and lastly how much variety is present in the contest itself, if variety is present, a lot of different actions are needed to complete the task, if it is absent, a lot of repetitive work is necessary. It is more likely that a person is motivated to participate in a competition if it offers some variety from their usual job, creating a bigger challenge to the person that wants to participate.
reflected in the autonomy measure. If the supervisor does not support the participation, they will not allow the employee the autonomy to work on their idea.
Tacitness is the fourth proposed indicator and involves three components (Haichao et. al., 2011). First, complexity of the knowledge, which is a measure of how much specific knowledge one needs to understand something. For example, it would require a lot of specific knowledge to create a search algorithm, on the other side, anybody could come up with a simple waste separation scheme. The second component of tacitness is the codifyability of the knowledge, which is the measure of how difficult it is to transfer the knowledge to others by writing it down or saving it and have someone else access the information. A concrete idea or product is a lot easier to transfer than knowledge that has been gained through years of experience, or a gut feeling. The last component of tacitness is the observability of the knowledge, this aspect reflects if it is possible to observe the knowledge used in the contest without experience or knowledge (Haichao, et. al., 2011). These tacitness levels can have both negative and positive outcomes. If a contest requires no tacit knowledge anybody could come up with the same equally correct solution, however if it requires too much tacit info, it might be impossible for the solver to convey the solution to the people that have to judge its value, discouraging a possible solver to work on it. Even though for different people the tacitness can provide different levels of motivation, it is expected that by and large, higher tacitness provides a bigger motivation. However, eventually, it could be that a challenge that is too tacit causes a decrease in motivation. For this research however it is expected that this point will not be reached, and trying to find this point will be beyond the scope of this research.
Extrinsic factors
Gaining monetary rewards is the first and most clear extrinsic factor. It is the basis of most motivational studies in work in general (Amabile, 1994) and in the motivation to enter into an external contest specifically (Brabham, 2010). It is bound to have an influence on the participation of people into contests. As mentioned earlier, the strength of this factor might not be as large as initially expected. The reasoning behind this is that the company that sets out the competition is already paying their employees, therefore a (small) monetary prize offered by the company might not offer much of an incentive. This opposed to external competitions where sometimes there is a huge amount of money offered to the winners. An example of this is the Ansari X PRIZE where the winning team received $10 Million (Wagner, 2011) or Netflix who offered $1 Million for a 10 percent improvement in their prediction algorithms (Wagner, 2011)
Gaining recognition is the second factor that can influence the motivation of employees to enter. The employee might want to impress his peers or supervisors by coming up with and entering an idea into the competition. It might also be an opportunity to get noticed by managers or stand out from one’s colleagues. This motivation was also found in the contest at Deltares, researched by Leung, van Rooij and van Deen (2014) here, the embeddedness of the employee within the company could be a big influence. The embeddedness perspective will be introduced later on in the article. Since most of the people in the upper echelons of a company work at the companies’ headquarter and they have limited time available (Birkinshaw, Bouquet & Ambos, 2007) it is hard to get noticed for an employee that doesn’t work at headquarter. Entering (and winning) a contest could therefore provide a good opportunity to the employee to get the attention and recognition from someone high up in the company (Haiouchi, 2014).
someone is dependent on the range of possible skills needed to enter, and the degree to which the person is motivated by learning. It is expected to have a moderate strength compared to the other indicators, due to this ambiguity.
Someone might also want to participate just because it feels good (Wang & Hou, 2015). For example because they are helping out the company or others they are working for (Hall & Graham, 2001). This indicator will be positive, but its strength is debatable, it depends on how much the sampled people will value this good feeling, especially compared to the other indicators.
As has already been mentioned in the intrinsic reward explanation, autonomy has an extrinsic part too, namely the opportunity to keep on working on the project after it has finished. An employee might be extra motivated to work on a proposal if he / she has a chance to continue to work on it after the competition. The other side of this is that when an employee believes that he will not be able to continue to work on his solution after it has been chosen as the winner of the competition, he might be very discouraged to submit one, knowing that eventually someone else will be working on his idea. This is one of the factors where the headquarter / subsidiary difference, which will be introduced below might be strong. The idea that someone in a subsidiary will submit an idea for the competition, and someone from far away corporate headquarter taking the idea and possibly ending up getting the credit for it might be a big disincentive, even when the original contestant got some kind of reward.
These extrinsic aspects might be very important for the employee, but as stated in the first hypothesis, might be lower than the intrinsic aspects. This is because it is easier to get extrinsically motivated form the work the employee regularly does. When these motivational aspects are already satisfied in the regular work, there is a chance that their added value in a contest decreases. Since the intrinsic motivators are specific to the task at hand, this is not the case with them, and therefore it is expected to have a bigger impact.
Headquarter versus subsidiary
participants as possible, it is vital to not only have employees in the companies’ headquarter participate, but also employees in subsidiary offices, and other branches abroad. Employees who work at corporate headquarter are ‘closer to the fire’ therefore they receive more attention from higher management and will most likely receive more recognition for their work from top management, merely because they are closer by. The subsidiary’s employees are bound to receive less attention and therefore less recognition for their work, ceteris paribus, because they are physically distant from the headquarter (Plourde, Parker & Schaan, 2014) and because company executives have only limited amounts of attention and time (Birkinshaw, et. al., 2007). So the chance to receive recognition for their work might be a bigger incentive for subsidiary employees than for employees that work at corporate headquarter. The second hypothesis is therefore
H2: When it comes to internal contests, employees in subsidiary offices are more sensitive to non-monetary extrinsic rewards than employees that work at a company’s headquarter.
Embeddedness
It could be that this headquarter subsidiary relation is not as clear-cut and dichotomous as set out in the second hypothesis. Not all subsidiaries are the same, and neither are their employees. It would make sense that this difference can affect employees’ motivations. To capture these differences, the perspective of embeddedness has been used (Garcia-Pont, Canales & Noboa, 2009, Granovetter, 1985).
more being a part of the company. This lower level of perceived control will decrease the resistance of the subsidiary to the headquarter leading to better performance. Also the tighter links between them also gives better communication and integration, leading to higher efficiency (Andersson & Forsgren, 1996). He splits up the perspective in two parts, external and corporate embeddedness, the first being contacts with outside actors, whom he proposes increase perceived control, the latter being embeddedness with the headquarter itself, which supports the main hypothesis of reducing perceived control. Other authors (Ciabuschi, Holm, & Martín, 2014, Najafi-Tavani, Giroud, & Sinkovics, 2012) have also used embeddedness to define the relations between headquarter, subsidiaries and sometimes the environment. The issue with these papers is that they miss a clear connection to the personal level of embeddedness that was its original focus in Granovetter’s (1985) research, due to their analysis of the offices, not the employee. However Garcia-Pont and colleagues (2009) propose a solution to this. In their research they re-define embeddedness in three different aspects, namely strategic, capability and operational embeddedness. In their research this perspective is applied to subsidiaries and their level of embeddedness with headquarter. Garcia-Pont et. al. (2004), just like Granovetter (1985) see embeddedness as a network of relations. This view and the three levels identified by Garcia-Pont (2004) can easily translate back to a personal level measure like the one that Granovetter (1985) already used. This leads to the third and last hypothesis:
H3: Differently embedded employees will be motivated by different motivational factors in internal contests.
units. The more the subsidiary develops these strategic capabilities, the higher the chances of being called to contribute”. The last dimension of embeddedness is operational embeddedness, this “reflects the set of relations between the subsidiary and other units of the organisation, that concern the day-to-day activities” (Garcia-Pont et. al. 2009). Because it is scaled for measurement of the individual, it can capture differences that are ignored by measurements that use a higher level of measurement like cultural distance (Vora & Kostova, 2007, Hofstede, 1983) or geographical distance (Plourde et. al. 2014), which would assign the same value to every employee from the same country, without making a distinction between different offices or other variables that are captured with a lower aggregation of analysis.
Embeddedness could have very different effects on how people are motivated. It could be that someone that scores high on capability embeddedness would be more motivated by hobbyist factors, being intrinsically rewarded by putting his capabilities to use on something not related to his day job. Or that someone who is very involved in the day-to-day operating of the company might be very happy with getting the autonomy to work on something completely different. Therefore this study will also look at how the motivational factors are influenced by different levels of the embeddedness perspectives, opening up the opportunity to target specific groups within a multinational organisation with different motivational factors, beyond the confines of physical location, position or culture.
Methodology
Approach
Inquiry has been made at several companies to ask whether they have an internal crowdsourcing competition or likewise initiative. To be able to answer all questions that are needed to test the hypotheses the company has to have at least one, preferably foreign, subsidiary in order to properly measure the embeddedness perspective. When a suitable company that wants to participate in the research is found they will be asked to distribute the questionnaire among their employees. The measure used is the intention to participate, therefore it is not specifically required for the company to have (had) an internal competition, preferably though they have. If they already held a contest the effect of previous participation on the motivation to participate can be analyzed. (Khasraghi & Aghaie, 2014). Khasraghi & Aghaie (2014) have found that there is a strong relation between participation in earlier contests and intention to participate in a next one.
The results of the survey will be analyzed, statistically relating the indicators to the factors and seeing which factors are strongest and if there is a significant difference between differently embedded individuals, eventually accepting or rejecting the hypotheses stated earlier. The first hypothesis looks at which of the two aspects of motivation is the most important. I expect intrinsic motivation to outweigh extrinsic motivation. The second hypothesis introduces the distinction between employees at corporate headquarters and those that work in subsidiary offices. The employees in the subsidiaries are expected to want to stand out and be recognized by the top management, that mainly subsides at the corporate headquarter. The third and last hypothesis divides the entire population not by location but by how embedded they are with the company. Since differently embedded people might have different wants and needs, it is expected that they also have different reasons to participate in an internal contest and therefore value some factors more than employees with different levels of embeddedness.
Study design
The objective of this research is to find out which factors are most important in employees motivation to participate in internal crowdsourcing contests. In order to research this, several factors that have been found to be important in motivational theory have been identified and described above. The next step is to find out in how far these factors have an impact on employees in internal contests.
For answering a question like the research question posed above a deductive approach is deemed most appropriate. The intention is to test theories that have set up in other research articles and described above and make some general assumptions about a population. To do this I used a survey to gather data (Thomas, 2004).
As stated beforehand the intention was to have one or more companies’ employees respond in a questionnaire, indicating to what degree the given motivational factors influenced their decision to participate (or not). However after a long process of searching for companies, finding out if they were suitable for the research and contacting them in the hopes that they would participate, it seemed unlikely that a company would cooperate such a study. Several companies simply did not have competitions like these or even the infrastructure to set one up. Others did but they did not have the resources to contribute to the research. Some companies were willing to help, but often there was a factor making it impossible, be it a lack of resources or the apparently sensitive nature of the information gathered in the questionnaire. It seemed like this avenue was not going to work out, because of this and because of the growing time constraint a new approach had to be found.
neither for the motivational factors nor the embeddedness perspectives. What is an obvious downside to having people fill in a web survey is that it is impossible to control the conditions under which they fill it in. Ideally all participants would be alone in a closed off room with just the survey to occupy them. A web based survey like this can not make sure this is the case making the data slightly less reliable; unfortunately there is no way around this in this study, but under the circumstances it was the best possible approach.
Participants
Since there was no lab available and there were no resources for a carefully selected panel or random sampling method, availability sampling (Thomas, 2004) was used. Through social media and email the survey was spread out using the snowball method, asking participants to share the survey so it reached beyond the social sphere of the researcher. This was necessary to ensure that there is less bias that occurs when only people that are directly related to the researcher respond. To get some grip on the population and to ensure that the participants did have the reasoning skills to complete the survey they were asked to fill in their highest level of education so, when necessary, a selection could be made between people with and without an academic education. In a laboratory setting most often a student population would be used to fill out the survey, simply because it is certain that they have the academic skills needed to understand the survey. In the analysis checks were made to make sure that there were no significant differences in answers between university students and graduates and the rest of the population.
Set up
Scenarios
In the second part, three scenarios were constructed, each one emphasizing one of the three embeddedness perspectives. The first scenario emphasized operational embeddedness, stating that the participant was very involved with the day-to-day operations of the company. The second one was strategic embeddedness, stating that the participant was a top strategist in the company. The last scenario set the participant up to be high on capability embeddedness, making their capabilities paramount to the companies effective operation. The web survey method made it possible to randomly assign one of the three scenarios to a participant.
It could be possible that participants mistake a scenario set up to be one form of embeddedness with another. An example of this could be that someone with skills that are very important to the company could be imagined to have influence on the strategy and lots of contacts with colleagues in day-to-day operations. Possible contaminations like this need to be avoided, since they could reduce the validity of the scenarios. Therefore the scenarios clearly excluded the embeddedness perspectives that they were not aimed to emphasize. This might have made the scenarios less probable to occur in real life, however care was taken to make sure that that the scenarios were still realistic enough to occur, if they were not, it could possibly make it harder to imagine them. For example the scenario emphasizing the operational perspective sketched the participant out to be so busy with his own work that he did not have time to worry about day-to-day business let alone the company’s strategies. The other scenarios were built up in a similar way. The full scenarios are available in the third appendix.
The control group participants only saw the general introduction and were told that they wanted to send in an idea to the contest, just like the other participants. The results of this control group set up the baseline of the research (Shuttleworth, 2010). When there are significant differences between the results of the control group and one or more of the groups that were shown a scenario it is likely that this has been caused by the treatment, and not by other confounding variables (Shuttleworth, 2010). In a perfect experiment it would be even better to have the survey set up to have a baseline of every individual participant and see what effect the scenario has, this could be done by testing the participants before and after the treatment. The problem with this approach is that the questions asked to set up the baseline gives the participants a direction, making them aware of what they have to pay attention to in the scenario, thus in the after treatment test. It also leaves more room for them to give socially accepted answers, or answers that they expect the researcher would want to hear. To exclude this possibility of a testing bias (Thomas, 2004) there was no observation done before the treatment.
Questionnaire
In the second part of the survey the subjects were asked several questions on their motivation to participate in the contest given the scenario they had just read. Indicating a score on a Likert scale of one to five on the given factors, 1 meaning completely disagree, 5 meaning completely agree (Likert, 1932). The questions used were reflections of the various factors of motivation explained in the theory part of this paper and extracted from the work of Haichao et. al. (2011) and Brabham (2010). These factors again reflected the two aspects of motivation, namely intrinsic and extrinsic (Amabile, 1993). Each factor was measured by three different questions, the indicators. These answers were pooled together to create the factors. If the tests show that these factors can indeed be taken together, it would be proof that the internal validity of the questions as set up by Haichao et. al. (2011) and Brabham (2010) is guaranteed. To recall, these factors are:
The researchers that have been mentioned in the theory section of this paper are associated with the indicators, and have tested these concepts, and Haichao et. al. (2011) and Brabham (2010), have adapted these concepts, and the questions relating to them, to fit to crowdsourcing contests. Where it was needed these were adjusted to be suitable in an internal competition setting. For example, for supervisory support the participants were asked to indicate how much they would be motivated given that: 1. You have a supervisor that actively supports the platform. And 2. Your supervisor does not want you to submit your idea. As you can see, the second question was asked in a negative way. This was done to make sure the participants were paying attention to the questions. It also made it possible to see if the answers to these questions show the same, but reversed, patterns as the other indicators of the same factor. Another question, this time about gaining monetary awards, was how much the participant was motivated by “a monetary reward provided by the platform”. One of the autonomy propositions was “being able to give your own interpretation to working out your idea”. For a full list of all the questions see appendix 2.
Control variables
Analysis
With the independent variable being the perspective of embeddedness the participant saw and the dependent variables the scores given on the respective indicators, there are limits to the analysis. The embeddedness perspective is a categorical variable (Agresti, 1996), they are either strategically, operational, capability or not embedded, these have no logical ordering of any kind and there is no value to these observations. The Likert scale used for scoring the motivational levels feeds back ordinal values, this means that there is a ranking within them. This ranking means that someone who scores five on a measure is more motivated than someone who scores a four, but there is no definable distance between the measures, if someone scores two on a measure it doesn’t mean that he is twice as motivated as someone who would score a one. Since the intention is to find out if the groups differ, an analysis of variance or ANOVA has been used (Thomas, 2004). One could use multiple t-tests in assessing this variance but with multiple groups the chance of a type 1 error (a false confirmation) (Peck & Devore 2011) increases strongly when more than two means are compared. Since there are four groups, ANOVA is a better tool for analysis. To make sure that the results are caused by the variation in the independent variable and not by chance, the significance was checked (De Vaus, 2002). In social sciences it is normal to have a significance threshold of .05 (Stevens, 2009) meaning that 5% of the difference may be explained by chance, instead of the induced difference tested in the research. The data was also tested to make sure that is was possible to perform an ANOVA, therefore the independence, normal distribution and variance were checked (Stevens, 2009) and they did not exceed the levels that could have made it impossible to perform the analyses. The independence needed to be checked to make sure there was no influence between the independent variables, the set up of the scenarios made sure this was not the case. The normal distribution was checked to see if the populations were comparable. The variances are automatically checked when performing an ANOVA, for the same reason as the normal distribution.
Analysis
Descriptive statistics
There have been 173 recorded responses to the survey. A quick look found that 107 surveys have been finished and 66 have not. This means that there has been a dropout rate of 38.2 percent. However two of these did finish the survey but failed to submit even thought their responses had been recorded. This makes for a total of 109 responses. The incomplete responses have been deleted.
Of all the responses, 49 (45%) were male and 60 (55%) were female (Table 1). The respondents were almost exclusively from the Netherlands (93.6%) (Table 2). In table 3 the spread of educational level is shown. 46 (42.2%) of the respondents were currently doing a university level education, another 13 (20%) finished their university education and another 21 finished college or HBO in Dutch. Another 16 graduated from MBO (coded as high school in English). We assume the people whose highest finished education was middle school (coded as middelbare school in Dutch) are currently studying at MBO or HBO. The two people who filled in other are currently studying applied sciences or have a scientific degree. There was a slight translation error in the educations, however since almost the entire population was Dutch those levels will be used.
Frequency Percent Cumulative percent
Male 49 45 45
Female 60 55 100
Total 109 100
Table 1: What is your Gender
Frequency Percent Cumulative Percent
Frequency Percent Cumulative Percent Studying university 46 42.2 42.2 Masters degree 6 5.5 47.7 Bachelors degree 7 6.4 54.1 College degree 21 19.3 73.4 High School 16 14.7 88.1 Middle School 11 10.1 98.2 Other 2 1.8 100 Total 109 100 Table 3: Education Operational embeddedness Strategic embeddedness Capability embeddedness Control group Valid 29 24 24 32
Table 4: Division of scenarios
As you can see in table 4 above, 29 (26.6%) people received the first scenario, emphasizing operational embeddedness, 24 (22%) saw the second scenario, the one that emphasized strategic embeddedness, another 24 (22%) were shown the third scenario, which emphasized capability embeddedness. Finally 32 (29.4%) participants were put into the control group. The survey software was made to balance out the participants to create equal size groups, but because of the responses that had to be deleted because they were incomplete the group sizes are a bit skewed. All groups have crossed the analysis threshold of 20 participants, so this will likely not affect the analysis.
In the table below you can see the age spread of the sample. There is a big part of participants that are in their early twenties, probably reflecting the big group of students that participated in the survey. There is also a considerate group of participants around fifty years old, proving that the survey reached beyond the social spheres of the researcher.
means of the ages of the scenario groups did not differ much either, with the mean of the control group being a bit higher than the rest but not enough to be deemed relevant for the analysis.
The gender allocation between groups was also quite equal, with means close to 1.5, which, since 1 means male and 2 means female indicates that there was an equal distribution. The same mean was found on the allocation of students and non students, this time again a bit higher amount of non students in the control group, reflecting the slightly older participants, yet again the results did not seem to have a big effect on the results. Age group N % < 25 61 55.9 25-35 24 22.0 36-50 16 14.7 > 50 8 7.3 Table 5: Age Preparing data
Now the sample is clear the variables needed to be prepared for analysis. To do that the questions that were asked in a negative way were recoded.
There was a sixth option the participants could choose, namely non-applicable, due to this there were some missing values. Some questions had relatively many missing values (6-7). Since the sample is quite big, these values were replaced by the means of the indicator. There were also two participants who filled in the same value on all the indicators, even the ones that were asked negatively. These responses have been deleted from the sample.
Checking data
Measures Cronbach’s Alpha
Intrinsic - Autonomy 0.653
Intrinsic - Variety 0.259
Intrinsic - Supervisory support 0.291
Intrinsic - Tacitness 0.398
Intrinsic - Hobbyist 0.521
Intrinsic - 12 indicators, no variety 0.720 Extrinsic - Monetary rewards 0.554
Extrinsic - Recognition 0.594
Extrinsic - Develop creative skills 0.641 Extrinsic - Getting good feeling 0.483
Extrinsic - Keep working 0.460
Extrinsic – All 15 indicators 0.739 Table 6: Cronbach’s Alpha’s
As you can see in the table above, according to these analyses none of the groups of indicators have enough internal power to be taken together as a single measure of what it was supposed to measure. If we go back to the first hypothesis, not only the specific factors matters, but the two aspects of motivation were of importance too. These aspects are intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. A Cronbach’s Alpha has been computed for both aspects. When the “variety” indicators were taken out of the analysis for the intrinsic aspect, the Cronbach’s alpha for the remaining intrinsic indicators was .720, which is enough to take them together. The Cronbach’s alpha for all the extrinsic measures was .739, so it was also high enough to take them together. There were a few other factors where, when one indicator was deleted, a high enough Cronbach’s Alpha was present. These indicators were creative skills 1&2, getting a good feeling 1&2 and keep working 1&3 (table 7). Composite measures were made to be able to analyze these combinations.
Measures Cronbach’s Alpha
Develop creative skills 1&2 0.789 Getting good Feeling 1&2 0.754
Keep working 1&3 0.757
To see if there were other relevant constructs to analyze, principal component analysis with varimax rotation was used. Some of the indicators were found to have enough eigenvalue to be taken together, most with one and some with two components. However analysis of these new constructs gave no new insights or significant results to be reported. Therefore these analyses and results will not be presented in this paper. Below, table 8 presents an overview of all the means of the single indicators and the composite measures that have been constructed as a result of the analysis above. The numbers in the tables below show us several things. The most striking part is probably the results on overall intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The first hypothesis of this paper stated that for employees, the most important motivational aspect was intrinsic motivation, partly due to the fact that employees are already receiving extrinsic rewards for their regular work. But even though the scores on monetary rewards 1&2 are just around 2.5, showing that money is indeed one of the least important motivators, the overall indicator of extrinsic rewards is very close to the intrinsic reward score. Showing that, in this research, there is no actual difference between the two aspects of motivation in internal competitions.
Indicator: Overall S0 S1 S2 S3 †=recoded indicator Mean Std.
dev F Means
Autonomy 1 – Getting time 3.89 .970 .264 3.81 3.86 4.04 3.88 Autonomy 2 – Getting freedom 4.21 .821 .550 4.16 4.38 4.17 4.13 Autonomy 3 – Own interpretation to idea 4.19 .822 .645 4.22 4.31 4.21 4.00 Develop creative skills 1 – Whilst working 3.72 .961 1.795 4.10 3.97 3.57 3.58 Develop creative skills 2 – Gain access to
skills 3.86 1.064 .882 3.84 3.86 3.50 3.63
Develop creative skills 3 – Already posses
relevant skills † 3.83 1.050 .694 3.84 4.00 3.95 3.61 Getting good feeling 1 – From participating 3.94 1.008 2.825* 4.23 4.14 3.57 3.71 Getting good feeling 2 – Enjoying
contributing 3.64 .981 1.191 3.81 3.62 3.75 3.33 Getting good feeling 3 – Forced to
participate † 4.07 1.117 .692 4.13 4.21 3.78 4.13 Hobbyist 1 – Same work free time 3.60 1.185 .560 3.55 3.59 3.87 3.43 Hobbyist 2 – Working as a hobby 3.64 1.080 .888 3.81 3.76 3.43 3.46 Hobbyist 3 - Earn money with same skills † 3.63 1.031 .072 3.68 3.59 3.57 3.67 Keep working 1 – After submission 4.10 1.052 2.220*
* 4.26 4.38 3.77 3.83 Keep working 2 – Idea Stolen † 3.91 .996 4.363* 3.66 4.25 3.27 4.13 Keep working 3 - Hope its chosen to 3.84 1.114 .427 3.94 4.00 3.96 3.71 Monetary rewards 1 – Awards as goal 2.47 1.256 .620 2.32 2.33 2.74 2.54 Monetary rewards 2 – Concern for 2.55 1.131 .106 2.48 2.64 2.50 2.58 Monetary rewards 3 - Need to be rewarded 3.39 1.269 .648 3.53 3.11 3.42 3.50 Recognition 1 – From management for idea 3.87 .968 1.126 3.97 4.07 3.70 3.67 Recognition 2 – In general by manager 3.25 1.066 1.934 3.42 3.50 2.86 3.08 Recognition 3 - From other contributors 3.17 1.091 .595 3.39 3.07 3.04 3.13 Supervisory support 1 – The platform 3.69 .946 .119 3.72 3.76 3.64 3.63 Supervisory support 2 – No support † 3.71 1.117 1.267 3.47 3.89 3.96 3.55 Supervisory support 3 - Sending in idea 4.02 .777 .289 4.00 3.93 4.14 4.04 Tacitness 1 – Complex knowledge 2.85 1.183 .769 2.75 3.14 2.74 2.75 Tacitness 2 – Observability 3.29 1.108 2.795* 3.47 3.64 3.00 2.92 Tacitness 3 – Codifyable 3.52 .918 1.425 3.71 3.52 3.59 3.21 Variety 1 – No skills variety needed 3.13 1.086 1.121 3.25 3.00 2.87 3.38 Variety 2 – Do different actions 2.61 1.026 .308 2.47 2.69 2.61 2.70 Variety 3 - Do the same actions† 3.76 .906 .401 3.66 3.90 3.70 3.79 Develop creative skills 1&2 3.77 .914 1.394 3.95 3.91 3.54 3.60 Getting good feeling 1&2 3.77 .887 1.572 3.98 3.87 3.63 3.52 Keep working 1&3 4.00 .922 1.118 4.08 4.19 3.89 3.76 Compound extrinsic 3.56 .500 .958 3.63 3.66 3.45 3.48 Compound intrinsic 3.57 .502 .582 3.64 3.60 3.52 3.47
Even though there were not many differences between the means of the different groups, there were some significant differences in the analysis. The indicators that showed a significant difference in the entire sample are shown in table 8 above. This section elaborates on the specific groups that significantly differed for a given indicator. To find which of the groups significantly differed, Tukey’s post-hoc comparison of means was used. The biggest significant (p = 0.009) difference was found in keep working 2. In which the people in group one scored almost a complete point higher than the people in group two. With the control group providing a nice average and the third group also scoring on the higher side. The results show that for getting good feeling 1 the control group scores the highest, with group two showing a significantly (p = 0.076) lower score. Tacitness 2 was the third measure that had a high level significant difference (p = 0.080) between the first and third group. The last score that showed a significant variation was keep working 2, but on a lower significance level than the other three (p < 0.10) in the entire sample and an insignificant difference p = 0.168 between group one and two, which was the best of all combinations.
Measures Average mean
Intrinsic - Autonomy 4.10
Intrinsic - Develop creative skills 3.80 Extrinsic - Getting good feeling 3.88
Intrinsic - Hobbyist 3.62
Extrinsic - Keep working 3.95
Extrinsic - Monetary rewards 2.80
Extrinsic - Recognition 3.43
Extrinsic - Supervisory support 3.90
Intrinsic - Tacitness 3.22
Intrinsic - Variety 3.17
Results
In the following section the results of the research will be interpreted, after that there will be a conclusion, possible managerial implications and the limitations to this research.
Hypotheses
The most striking result that the analyses show is that there is almost no difference between the measures of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. This means that the indicators of those motivations as defined in this research are equally strong. Even with deletion of the weakest indicators (monetary rewards) or with using a reduced scale (attained by deleting keep working 2) there was no significant difference between the means. From this we can conclude that we can reject hypothesis one:
H1: Intrinsic rewards gained by working on an internal competition are more important in employee motivation to participate in internal competitions than extrinsic rewards.
It is clear that there is no significant difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation given the measures provided in this research. However leading up to the hypothesis it was argued that one of the reasons intrinsic rewards would be more effective was because of the fact that employees were already being paid by the company that set out the contest. The finding that monetary rewards have the lowest scores of all motivational indicators does support the idea that money is not one of the main reasons people participate. What is also clear is that the other extrinsic variables are just as important as the intrinsic ones.
According to the respondents, support from a supervisor is one of the most important extrinsic factors. This seems to make a lot of sense, when someone’s boss does not support the entry he might block access or just not allow his employees the time to work on it. No matter how motivated someone is, without consent or support from the person they work for, it becomes very difficult to work on it.
supported by the entire organization, including (top) management. This is in line with what Schepers & Schnell (1999) found when they researched the idea competition platform at Siemens. They say that even at the preliminary stage, the management need to send a “clear message of committed support”, they also mention this support needs to be continued, not only until the winner is chosen but also throughout the implementation phase (Schepers & Schnell, 1999). The single most important motivator for employees is to get the freedom to work on their idea, to know that the contest and their participation is supported throughout the company and that they can do what is needed to work on it. This was also found at the competition researched at Deltares (Leung et al., 2014). The participants that they had interviewed were mainly frustrated by the “lack of avenues for following up on ideas” which is comparable to the “keep working” factor in this research.
The second hypothesis in this study was:
H2: When it comes to internal contests, employees in subsidiary offices are more sensitive to non-monetary extrinsic rewards than employees that work at a company’s headquarter.
The intention was to measure this by asking employees where they worked and see the influence that has had on their motivation. The experimental setting of this research however made it impossible.
Since the embeddedness perspective was already accepted as a more useful measure of distance in this research, it was an easy decision to use it for the scenarios instead of the subsidiary / headquarter perspective. Unfortunately this leaves H2 inconclusive. The third and last hypothesis of this study was
H3: Differently embedded employees will be motivated by different motivational factors in internal contests.
level (p < .10). Interesting is that group S1, treated with the operational embeddedness scenario, and on two (P < 0.05) – occasions has the highest and two times (one of them p < 0.05) the second highest mean on these indicators. Group S2, the strategically embedded one, scores the lowest on these three times and second lowest for the other one. So given the perspectives that do have a significantly different mean, group S1 is more motivated than S2 in every way. Since both of these perspectives emphasize the scenario of someone who is very committed to the workings of the company, but on different levels, it is this level that matters, not the commitment. The operationally embedded person is entrenched into the day-to-day handlings of the firm, whereas the strategically embedded person is more concerned about the strategy and the company overall, so he has less contact with the workfloor. It could be that because the operationally embedded person is more in contact with the workfloor, he is more motivated and better suited to participate and help the company. That person is also most likely better up to date with what is going on in the others employees’ and the customers minds. Another possibility might be that for the strategically embedded person, his participation does not matter much. He has proven himself, and has the position to reflect that. He can already influence the strategy of the company due to his function. He does not need a competition to make his ideas known. The operational person was told he never made it up to a management position – to reflect the fact that he was low on strategic embeddedness. Therefore this person could see his participation to the contest as a possibility to stand out, make himself known to corporate headquarter and higher management, to prove his worth. This all could explain why he is more motivated to do so. The ability to stand out also reflects well into the perspectives that he scores higher on. A more tacit job equals a bigger challenge, so a better chance to stand out. This is one point where the internal contest motivation deviates from the external contest. Haichao and colleagues (2011) found that tacitness in external competitions is negatively related to motivation to participate.
make by sending in an idea he could either already have done, or would be dwarfed by his normal assignments.
Since some variables show a significant difference, but most do not, H3 is partially accepted.
There could be several reasons for this lack of significant results on this aspect. The first reason is that there are no significant results to be found. This would mean that the groups, as presented here, divided on the perspective of embeddedness, do not really differ from each other. This could mean that employee groups are more or less homogenous in terms of their embeddedness, or that there is another variable that could explain the differences in motivation of employees in contests.
Another, perhaps more likely reason could be that there are more and / or bigger differences between motivations of differently embedded employees than found here, but that this research was not capable of capturing these differences. This could happen for all sorts of reasons. The scenarios could have transferred the message it was intended to in a suboptimal way, either because it was not presented strongly enough, or because there were confounding parts in the scenarios. It could also have been that the message did not reach the readers in the way it was intended to. Or the participants did not give enough weight to the scenarios, and let their own motivations outweigh the motivations of the person they were supposed to be filling in the motivation for. Another possibility is that they did not completely read the scenario, or understood the text in the scenario and the message it conveys. Unfortunately there is no way to make sure which one of these possibilities is true.
Control Variables
rewards (in internal contests) decreases and employees start to care more for developing skills. In its very core this could be seen as a representation of one of the original motivating theories, for example the needs hierarchy of Maslow (1954). Older people are more likely to have fulfilled all the needs of the pyramid making the last one, self-actualization, the relevant, or, if you look at more recent theories, more prominent factor. Developing creative skills most likely falls into this category. This is also in line with the research of Inceoglu, Segers & Bartram (2012) who found a negative relation between motivation by money and age and a positive relation between intrinsic motivation and age, especially the positive relation they found with personal principles are reflected in the results found here. The correlations that have been found could also represent that fact that older people already earn more than younger people, (BLS, 2014) and are therefore less sensitive to monetary rewards that could be earned with an internal competition.
There were also a couple of indicators that showed a significant difference between university students and the rest of the participants. These significant values are shown in table 9. These indicators are develop creative skills 1 – whilst working (p = 0.004), develop creative skills 2 – gaining access to (p = 0.021) and develop creative skills 3 – already posses relevant skills (p = 0.011), supervisory support 2 – no support (p = 0.001), variety 2 – do different actions (p = 0.015) and tacitness 3 – codifyable (p = 0.004). The most striking of these is of course the fact that on every measure of develop creative skills, the students scored significantly lower than the rest of the population. Apparently, students are less motivated by the possibility of developing their skills than people with a different level of education and people that are already working. This could be because students believe that they already possess all the skills they could need, or that a contest is not the way to build skills. It could also mean that people with more work oriented education, or people that already have a job, attach a higher value to developing their skills, their practical experience showing them the value of growing your creative skillset.
Indicator Mean student Mean non-student Significance
Develop creative skills 1 3.49 4.08 .004
Develop creative skills 2 3.48 3.90 .021
Develop creative skills 3 3.56 4.08 .011
Supervisory support 2 1.86 2.61 .001
Variety 2 2.89 2.40 .015
Tacitness 3 3.21 3.73 .004
Table 10: Means of significant differences between student and non-student
Students in this case apparently are more afraid of the judgment of their supervisor than people with a lower education or the ones that already have a job. Since most of the group of non-students is indeed working, it might be that their experience with supervisors have made them less afraid, and more willing to go against the will of their supervisors.
There were two factors that showed similar patterns, these were variety and tacitness. This seems to make sense since they are both aspects of how difficult a task is. Even though students have the highest mean on variety and non-students the highest mean on tacitness, they do indicate the same thing. This is caused by the fact that tacitness 3 asked, “The knowledge you have to use in this project is codifyable”. Which means that a higher score indicates a higher level of motivation if the task is easier – more codifyable. So the lower score on codifyability is in line with the higher score on tacitness by students. The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that students are more motivated by a more difficult task. This seems to reflect the inquisitive nature of students and their search for big challenges.
Additional Data
Questionnaire
The participants of the contests in the Dutch firm were not shown any scenarios. Since they actually participated and are already working in a firm, this was not necessary. They were asked the same questions as the other participants, but slightly adapted to reflect the fact that the competition had already taken place. Apart from the control variables already presented, they were also asked where they worked, so a distinction could be made between headquarter and subsidiary employees. The last difference was that they were asked to score themselves on their own level of embeddedness within the firm. However due to the small sample it is impossible to draw conclusions from this scoring.
Data
The loose indicators of the factors showed a much higher internal consistency than those of the main sample. There were a lot more Cronbach’s alphas above 0.7, which allowed for analysis of the factors and not just the indicators of for example supervisory support, keep working and tacitness.
Results
Several of the results found in this study were supported by this small subsample. For example, the factor supervisory support was scored with a 4.1, which is even higher than its score in the original survey sample. The factor for keep working had a score of 4.2, making it the most important factor for the participants of the contest. The importance of these motivational factors is also supported by the comments provided by some of the participants. For example, one participant mentioned “It was a nice initiative, however not supported widely by the workfloor supervisors.” Another one commented, “The format of the outcome was already defined at the set up of the contest, this limited the creative and out-of-the-box idea creation.” Also the lack of time and short deadlines in a period that was also very busy with the regular activities were said to be problematic.
company.” All these comments, together with the figures reflect the importance of freedom and support found earlier.
On the other had, tacitness, variety and monetary rewards were given low scores (below 3) by the participants. Signing that to them, just like the participants of the main research, these factors are not the most important motivational aspects.
The participants were asked about the location of their office, this to test the headquarter / subsidiary perspective, as set up in the second hypothesis. However, probably due to the small sample size, the results did not show any significant differences between motivations of headquarter or subsidiary employees in internal contests.
Conclusion
The first question that this paper was intended to answer was:
What motivational factors influence an employees’ intention to participate in an internal crowdsourcing contest?
By using scenarios and a survey, it appears that the most important factor that influences an employee to participate in an internal competition is the amount of support the contest receives. Getting support from management and the freedom to work on the idea poses the biggest motivator. Not money or a “pat on the shoulder”. The employees just want to be able to work on it, know they will not be judged for doing so, and stay connected to the project when it is chosen as a winner, and not lose control, rather receiving more autonomy and time to keep on working and building the idea that they conceived.
The second question this paper was set out to answer is:
Does an employees’ position in the company have an influence on his/her motivation to participate?
attributable to the research set up than the perspectives themselves. Therefore I believe that it is too early to discard the embeddedness perspective altogether. The fact that, even with this set-up, there was a significant difference between some of the indicators can be a signal that there is merit to distinguishing employees on their embeddedness. From the results that were significant, it is at least possible to say that overall, someone with a strategic function is most likely less motivated to enter an idea than someone who is more ingrained into the day-to-day operations of the company. If we take this to an international perspective, the emphasis on the factors that did vary could be even bigger. Since most strategic effort is made in the company headquarter, a subsidiary employee is even more likely to not be strategically embedded. Therefore the emphasis should be put on the factors that are related to the keep working indicators, especially the fear of their idea being stolen can be very important. For an employee working at a foreign subsidiary, the company’s headquarter may seem like a far away machine of rules and regulations. And even though the headquarter might have the best intentions (Foss, Foss & Nell, 2012), the subsidiary employee might still fear that their input will be swallowed up by this machine. This makes it even more important in an international perspective, that the people issuing the competition seem genuine and willing to commit to the ideas sent in, showing that the people that came up with the ideas do get the credit, and do get the opportunity to see their work completed if they win.
So even though it is unclear if subsidiary employees are differently motivated, by assuming that they are, by and large, differently embedded, some conclusions can be made for the international employees.
Managerial implications
contest should have a broad support base, and the people that made the effort of having an idea and the motivation to work on it should be given the support and resources needed to work out their idea to a viable concept. As was found evaluating the contest at Deltares, not just the top management but also middle management needs to show their commitment, since they often control the resources needed by the participants to work out their idea (Leung, van Rooij, van Deen, 1999). Continued engagement with the project is also very important. The results show that most motivation is gained from these factors. Managers need to take into account that when they are designing the contests, the employees that are working on an idea need to be able to clear part of their schedule to work on their idea. The supervisors also need to broadcast their support for their subordinates sending in their ideas, and showcase this support by allowing their subordinates the time to work on it, just like Schepers and Schnell (1999) found at Siemens. Management must send a clear message to the employees throughout the company that this is not a corporate ruse to get some good ideas and be done with it. They need to show their support and commitment, and allow the winners the time and freedom to work on their project, for example bringing the winners to the corporate headquarter to work on their project, if at all possible. This also gives off a sign for future participants and contests that the management is committed and that effort will pay off. This is also reflected in the comment of one of the Dutch companies participants. He said that there was not enough time to work on the idea, it was planned in a busy part of the year and his regular work had priority over working on his idea. This also coincides with the finding of Schepers and Schnell (1999), according to them, the contest must be timed right, in order to get the biggest possible response.
