Team Diversity and Team Success in Collaborative Crowdsourcing

The value of crowdsourcing in solving problems is its ability to aggregate diversity from a crowd. The literature tends to define diversity as a general attribute of the crowd, without unpacking it as a multidimensional concept or measuring it as an attribute of members within a crowd. This study examines collaborative crowdsourcing where people form virtual bona fide groups to win social issue contests. Guided by the literature on generative co-creation and Social Identity Theory, this paper investigates how diversity at the team level affects team winning. With behavioral data from a global crowdsourcing community Openideo, this study finds that teams with higher diversity in members’ expertise, winning experience, and geolocation distribution are more likely to win crowdsourcing contests. However, higher team diversity attributed to members’ community tenure could lead to worse team performance. Discussion on how to leverage the benefits of diversity in collaborative crowdsourcing while avoiding disruptive influences are provided.