Peer-recognition and Performance in Online Crowdsourcing Communities

Recent advances in information technology bring significant changes to the nature of social interactions and information exchange. Physical face-to-face communications are slowly replaced by online virtual communities. Motivated by this phenomenon, this research investigates how voluntary community involvement and self-disclosure behavior impact a member´s peer-recognition and task performance within a virtual crowd sourcing competition community. We collected secondary data from the discussion forums of a specialized crowd sourcing platform that focuses on data analytics projects. Our results reveal that a member´s community involvement improves both the peer-recognition of the member in the community and his/her performance ranking. Our findings have strategic implications to participants of virtual crowd sourcing communities and other professional online communities.