Virtual Team Performance in Crowdsourcing Contests: A Social Network Perspective

Social media technologies have made it feasible for organizations to tap "wisdom of the crowd" beyond their own workforce. Many organizations use online crowdsourcing contests to find solutions for their business problems. In these contests, self-organized virtual teams compete for monetary reward. Motivated by this phenomenon, this research investigates how the social network structure of a virtual team impacts its performance in the context of online crowdsourcing contests. Specifically, we empirically assess the impacts of member social-capital, intellectual-capital, and the alignment of these two measures on team performances. Our analysis suggests that the alignment of member social-capital and intellectual-capital has a negative impact on team performances. Our findings have strategic implications to participants of virtual crowdsourcing competitions and to the design of virtual work teams.