Crowdwork from an HRM Perspective - integrating Organizational Performance and Employee Welfare

In this paper, we take a Human Resource Management (HRM) perspective on crowdwork. Given HRM's changeful history, we argue that a holistic HRM perspective should consider both a performance and an employee welfare perspective. While the performance perspective emphasizes the sourcing of crowdworkers' work potential and transforming this potential into actual performance according to organizational goals, a welfare perspective highlights the consequences of crowdwork on individuals and the repercussions of crowdwork-related HRM practices on societal level. For each perspective, we suggest various HR-related dimensions through which we explore different forms of online crowdwork. On the side of the performance-view, these include work design, planning and coordination; recruitment and selection; performance management; training and development; and compensation. On the side of the employee welfare-view, we look at the dimensions quality of work, compensation, employment opportunities, and power issues in crowdwork. By integrating performance and welfare perspectives, we uncover a variety of complex and partly interrelated opportunities and challenges of crowdwork for HRM.