Are Social Dominance-Based Faultlines Harmful in Crowdsourcing Tournaments?

Firms organize tournaments in crowdsourcing platforms to outsource complex tasks to external contributors. Members of a crowdsourcing platform may form temporarily self-organized virtual teams to participate in a crowdsourcing tournament. Social dominance-based faultlines widely exist in these virtual teams. These faultlines result from the alignment of team member’s social dominance related attributes (e.g., rank and tier) in the crowdsourcing platform and may spilt group into subgroups. Although inter-subgroup bias may disrupt team communication and collaboration, distinct knowledge and perspective from different subgroups are potential resource to group brainstorming and team coordination. Drawing on the Categorization- Elaboration Model (CEM), this study investigates the contingent effects of team intellectual capital and team feedback seeking tendency on the relationship between social dominance-based faultlines and team performance in the context of crowdsourcing tournament. We collected real objective data about 208 teams from one of the biggest crowdsourcing platforms, Kaggle.com. We find that social dominance- based faultlines positively affect team performance for teams with low intellectual capital and high feedback seeking tendency; by contrast, these faultlines negatively affect team performance for teams with high intellectual capital and low feedback seeking tendency. Academic and practical implications and future research directions are discussed.