The effectiveness of crowdsourcing in knowledge-based industries: the moderating role or transformational leadership and organisational learning

Crowdsourcing provides an opportunity for SMEs to exploit collective knowledge that is located outside the organisation. Crowdsourcing allows organisations to keep pace with a fast-changing environment by solving business problems, supporting R&D activities, and fostering innovation cheaply, flexibly, and dynamically. Nevertheless, managing crowdsourcing is difficult, and positive outcomes are not guaranteed. Drawing on the Resource-based View, we study transformational leadership and organisational learning capability as complementary assets to help SMEs deploy crowdsourcing. An empirical study of Spanish telecommunications and biotechnology companies confirmed the moderating effect of organisational learning on the relationship between crowdsourcing and organisational performance.