Crowdsourcing for addressing grand challenges: Sponsor-challenge fit, identified motivation, and the intention to submit

Despite the growing interest in using crowdsourcing to address grand challenges such as climate change, the underlying mechanism that explains users' intention to submit ideas to such crowdsourcing initiatives of relevance for wider society is poorly understood. Building on the self-determination theory, this article investigates different types of motivation and provides compelling theoretical and empirical evidence for the critical role of one motivation which is so far under-researched, that of identified motivation (i.e., which is personally important and consciously valued), in triggering users' intention to submit. We further identify a new construct stimulating motivation—sponsor-challenge fit—and reveal identified motivation as an underlying mechanism explaining the influence of sponsor-challenge fit on the intention to submit to crowdsourcing initiatives addressing grand challenges. We demonstrate the importance of identified motivation compared to other types of motivation and explore two moderators (sponsor transparency and sponsor capability) in two scenario-based experiments involving fictitious crowdsourcing initiatives. The first study demonstrates that increased sponsor transparency (i.e., open disclosure of submission guidelines and selection criteria) strengthens the effect of sponsor-challenge fit on users' identified motivation and, consequently, their intention to submit. The second study reveals that sponsor capability (i.e., financial and operational ability to develop ideas further) can mitigate the negative effects of a low sponsor-challenge fit, thereby enhancing identified motivation even when the fit is low. Our article contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the identified motivation's role in addressing grand challenges, clarifying the impact of the alignment between sponsor and challenge on engagement, and demonstrating how sponsor transparency benefits organizations with high fit while sponsor capability aids those with low fit.