Virtual Team Performances in Crowdsourcing Contests

Recent advances in information technology bring significant changes to the nature of work by allowing companies to tap “wisdom of the crowd ” beyond their own workforce. In particular, organizations increasingly seek solutions to their business problems using online crowdsourcing contests that are open to the public. In these contests, self-organized virtual teams compete for monetary reward. Motivated by this new 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 impact of the alignment of member centrality within the virtual team with their skill levels on team performances. Our analysis suggests that that member centrality-skill alignment has a negative impact on team performances. Our findings have strategic implications to the design of virtual work teams