Crowdsourcing has provided firms with a new way to involve their users with innovation activities. By outsourcing innovation-related tasks to huge external crowds, companies can access diverse creative ideas. Despite the great potential of crowdsourcing communities, it remains unclear how to create the necessary community environment to drive the creative ideas of participants. The present research investigates the effects of community fairness on the creativity of participants in crowdsourcing communities. Justice theory indicates that three types of justice are positively related to the creativity of participants: distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice. Our research model is generally supported by a survey of 238 participants in one of the biggest crowdsourcing communities in China. We find that the three types of justice influence participants' creativity through different mechanisms. Furthermore, idea generation and idea cooperation mediate the relationship between distributive justice, procedural justice and creative performance. Our study provides both theoretical and practical implications. RésuméLe crowdsourcing (travail collaboratif de masse ou encore utilisation des internautes) représente pour les entreprises un nouveau moyen d'intégrer les utilisateurs dans les activités d'innovation. En externalisant les tâches d'innovation vers une multitude d'internautes, les entreprises peuvent avoir accès à un nombre important d'idées créatives. Etant donné le grand potentiel représenté par les communautés de crowdsourcing, il est difficile de déterminer comment on peut créer au sein de la communauté un environnement qui permette de mettre en action les idées des participants. L'étude analyse les effets de la justice sur la créativité des participants dans les communautés de crowdsourcing. La théorie de la justice indique que trois types de justice sont corrélés positivement à la créativité d'un participant. Notre modèle de recherche est généralisé à l'une des plus grandes communautés de crowdsourcing en Chine par une enquête portant sur 238 participants. Les résultats montrent que les trois types de justice influencent la créativité des participants à travers différents mécanismes: la justice distributive, la justice procédurale et la justice interactionnelle. De plus la génération et la coopération d'idées jouent un rôle de médiateur dans la relation entre justice distributive, justice procédurale et performance créative. L'étude présente des implications théoriques et pratiques.

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Organizations can tap the wisdom of the crowd through digital platforms of crowdsourcing for ideation. However, we have limited understanding of factors affecting the innovativeness of ideas and solutions submitted by individual participants. Drawing upon self-determination theory and regulatory focus theory, we investigate how participants' regulatory focus and extrinsic motivation aroused by incentivizing mechanisms affect their creativity in crowdsourcing communities. Based on the data collected from 164 participants in a crowdsourcing platform, we find that promotion focus positively influences participants' creativity, and different types of extrinsic motivation have differential effects. Although external, identified, and integrated motivation positively affect participants' creativity, introjected motivation is not significantly related to participants' creativity. In addition, external and identified motivation strengthen the relationship between promotion focus and creativity. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications of this study are discussed.