Date of Award

7-2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Gary Burns

Second Advisor

Patrick Converse

Third Advisor

Abram Walton

Fourth Advisor

Lisa Steelman

Abstract

There is substantial opportunity for I-O psychology to study and further understand the growing industry of gig work. The research gap in the limited domain of gig work prompted the exploration of studying what perceived job characteristics matter for crowdsource workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and whether job characteristics predict traditional workplace outcomes in the gig economy. Participants from MTurk allowed the research question to be efficiently assessed within a gig related crowdsourcing sample. This study demonstrated that traditional theories from I-O psychology can apply to crowdsource based work. Specifically, job characteristics were related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and were found to be further mediated by workers’ level of autonomous motivation. Worker seriousness, while not a significant moderator for all moderated mediation models, had a moderating impact on certain indirect effects. This study further adds to the limited, but growing, literature examining work in the gig economy and provides a furthering of the current understanding of crowdsource based work on MTurk

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