Lead Author: Jorge Irving Terrón Contreras, iterron@itesm.mx

Nowadays the Internet allows organizations to reach out from its inner resources to a broader set of individuals that are prepared to serve and solve real business problems. These outer resources come as a community of professionals ready to take action with fewer formalities but rather other implications.
Formally known as crowdsourcing, there is a small quantity of studies that are focusing mostly on defining and understanding what it is and fundamentally explaining how the crowd behaves and how to motivate individuals to perform.
Most crowdsourcing platforms today rely on a community of people who is looking to solve simple units of work, however another form of crowdsourcing based on a different configuration of solvers and sets of tasks that are grouped together as complex work. In this scenario, seekers are not looking for the completion of repetitive and simple tasks but rather solving problems that require multiple and compatible individual competences that are bounded together in groups of people that act in short-term virtual teams.
Most individuals in these teams haven’t even met before and probably won’t work together anymore after completing their projects so factors such as team design is critical. This gives the Crowdsourcer – which organizes the crowd in teams – an important role for team performance and success.
Crowdsourcing teamwork is growing and so does the need for organizations and to prepare themselves in order to take advantage of these virtual labor markets. Previous research on personal values on face-to-face environments gives us hints to understand collaboration. However, we do aim to understand better team design based on personal values and beliefs and how it influences performance in virtual environments to provide a solid framework for future research

Research Question
Which set of individual characteristics work better when designing short-term virtual teams?
Proposed Hypotheses:

H1: Team members’ goal oriented values will be positively related to team performance

H2: Team members’ competitiveness values will be positively related to team performance

H3: The relationship between team members’ goal oriented values and competitiveness values with team performance will be mediated by conflict resolution style.

Collaboration Opportunities:
This is a doctoral dissertation research project and thus the Lead Author must remain the sole author of the study for the time being.
However, the Lead Authors are open to collaboration with other X-Culture colleagues. The involvement must be limited to an advisory role until the doctoral dissertation is defended. Once defended, a closer involvement of other colleagues can be deepened and formalized as co-authorship and the co-authors will develop one or more publishable journal papers together.
Please contact the Lead Author directly to discuss it further.