Digital labourers’ proactivity and the venture for meaningful work: Fruitful or fruitless?

Abstract

Digital Labor, taking up flexible but small‐scale employment arrangements on online intermediary platforms, with few constraints on how much, when, and where work is performed, are becoming the new work reality for many individuals. Scholars have argued that this type of work is inherently demeaning. We seek to explore the worker’s perspective and how their long‐term perspective aligns or misaligns with their actual work arrangement. We draw on career construction theory and hypothesize a job–career congruence model suggesting that when workers’ cognitive presentations of their microwork as jobs or careers are incongruent, they are less likely to experience their work as meaningful. The results from a two‐stage field study of 803 workers from two microworking platforms support the negative effect of an incongruent job–career schema on workers’ experience of meaningful work. Additionally, results demonstrate that even workers who are proactive in nature, seem unable to excel in these fluid work settings when their job‐career schema are not aligned. Practitioner Points Contrary to what platform organizations may expect, digital labourers view crowdworking as both a job and a career, which in turn fosters meaningfulness. Careers are important aspect in understanding digital labourers’ understanding of their jobs and careers. Keeping this in mind, we would encourage platform organizations to: provide career development opportunities, instead of focusing on short‐term incentives. This would cultivate crowdworkers’ career outlook, cultivate job–career congruence, and help mediate issues related to lack of career prosperity in microwork design. recognize aspirational career elements, such as career ladders, employability, and work–life balance to reduce possible exploitation in this employment area. Focusing only on job features such as flexibility, autonomy, and rewards is insufficient to motivate and inspire meaningfulness among digital labourers. provide training focused on career adaptability. This may attract relevant talent and platforms may benefit from providing training opportunities in the long term.

Investigating the Relationship between Capability and Motivation of Crowd Worker to Get Better Performance: A Mathematical Approach

“…Attempting challenging tasks to earn more reputation and compensation, introduced in level 2, is considered as M x_L2 and expressed in equation (18).…”

“…Even most crowd workers, with sufficient knowledge and skill, could not get the second task if they underperform in the first task [15]. Worker's motivation is another challenge, as reported by [16][17][18].…”

Vocational Training has an Influence on Employee Career Development: A Case Study Indonesia

“…Successful companies usually develop career planning and then strive to achieve their plans. Career approaches must be managed through carefully supervised and correct planning (Dalla Rosa et al, 2020;Kang & Kaur, 2020;Park et al, 2020;Verma & Kesari, 2020;Wong et al, 2020;Zuo et al, 2020).…”

“…Training is the responsibility of a manager to develop employees in a company. According to (Al Maani et al, 2020;Gahlawat & Kundu, 2020;Kim, 2020;shakur et al, 2020;Shiferaw, 2020;Wong et al, 2020;Woods et al, 2020), 'Training refers to the methods used to give new employees the skills they need to do the job''. According to (Alene, 2020;Bäker et al, 2020;Choudhary et al, 2020;Clarke & Lipsig-Mummé, 2020;Fatoki, 2020;Milica & Milica, 2020) Activity activities are designed to provide employees with the learning, skills, and knowledge needed for their current work.…”

Working on my own: Measuring the challenges of gig work

“…Becker, 1982; Campion, 2019; Friedman, 2014; Harvey, 1967; Menger, 2003). Gig work is as varied as organizational work (Friedman, 2014; Katz and Krueger, 2019; Kuhn, 2016), with some gig workers engaging primarily in lower skilled, task-based work (such as ridesharing or microwork; Guda and Subramanian, 2019; Kost et al, 2018; Veen et al, 2020; Wong et al, 2020) and others engaging in longer-term, knowledge-intensive, and creative work (such as IT consulting, coaching, and graphic design; Kuhn and Galloway, 2019; Kunda et al, 2002). Some gig work is accessed through digital platforms (Connelly et al, 2021), while other gigs are found in more traditional ways, including solicitation, advertising, and networking (Butler and Stoyanova Russell, 2018).…”