A Process Theory on Transformation of Work Through Internal Crowdsourcing

Internal crowdsourcing showed a substantial increase of use in recent years, since it describes a promising alternative to traditional orchestration of employees in today’s digital era. However, literature falls short in explaining the transformation process that is enacted by such approaches of platform-based work organization. By using a work organizational perspective with the existing body of knowledge in combination with a revelatory case study, this paper develops a process theory explaining the transformation process of internal crowdsourcing over time and how the organization of work transform during this process. Moreover, we discovered four different forms of organizing work with a completely new form of work organization: the “Hybrid Flash Organization”. Scholars can identify critical incidents and process phases, while practitioners use our findings as a transformation guideline of internal crowdsourcing to detect potential threads, opportunities and constraints along the way of a successful implementation.