Collaborative crowdsourcing has become a popular approach to organizing work
across the globe. Being global also means being vulnerable to shocks --
unforeseen events that disrupt crowds -- that originate from any country. In
this study, we examine changes in collaborative behavior of editors of Chinese
Wikipedia that arise due to the 2005 government censor- ship in mainland China.
Using the exogenous variation in the fraction of editors blocked across
different articles due to the censorship, we examine the impact of reduction in
group size, which we denote as the shock level, on three collaborative behavior
measures: volume of activity, centralization, and conflict. We find that
activity and conflict drop on articles that face a shock, whereas
centralization increases. The impact of a shock on activity increases with
shock level, whereas the impact on centralization and conflict is higher for
moderate shock levels than for very small or very high shock levels. These
findings provide support for threat rigidity theory -- originally introduced in
the organizational theory literature -- in the context of large-scale
collaborative crowds
