Abstract: The essence of online crowdsourcing is open innovation, which maximizes the value of both crowdsourcing enterprises and the public by stimulating the creativity of the public. Crowdsourcing system expands the boundary of the utilization of organizational resources, and realize internal and external interactive innovation by mining external intellectual resources. Network crowdsourcing is an integration of the extension of knowledge management and the outsourcing of resource popularization. The charm of crowdsourcing is to transform the external social mass creativity into enterprise productivity through the Internet. The participants’ creativity in network crowdsourcing system is fundamentally derived from the participation behavior of individual. And if the participants have a very good record of crowdsourcing contests and rich contests experience, the participants are confident in the contests, which may be arouse the enthusiasm of the participants in crowdsourcing contests and motivate participants to the highest level of creativity. If the participants spend a lot of time and effort on crowdsourcing contests, they will put more time, energy and emotion into the crowdsourcing contests, which is likely to bring about a high level of individual creativity and ultimately improve the performance of the overall crowdsourcing system. Therefore, we study the factors affecting participants creativity in network crowdsourcing, and further analyze the path of work engagement and self-efficacy on individual creativity.
This paper not only can enrich the theory of network crowdsourcing participants’ creativity research, but also make up for the lack of quantitative methods of the current network crowdsourcing research insufficiency. In theoretical aspect, it also can extend the network crowdsourcing research methods and ideas, and has a very positive role to study on the breadth and depth of crowdsourcing theory. In practice, it can provide a good theoretical basis to promote the healthy development of the network crowdsourcing contests and stimulate the wisdom and creativity of the general public, and has far-reaching realistic significance.
As a result, this paper studies the main factors that influence the individual creativity in network crowdsourcing system from work engagement and self-efficacy. First, we introduce the related theories of work engagement and self-efficacy, and analyze the relationship between work engagements, self-efficacy and individual creativity of network crowdsourcing participants. Then, we propose our research hypotheses, and construct the concept model of the relationship between individual work engagement, self-efficacy and creativity, and use the structural equation model to test our model validate hypotheses.
In this paper, we select the participants on the Kaggle crowdsourcing contest platform (a data analysis competition website) as the research object. As one of the internationally renowned online crowdsourcing competition platforms, the participants on the Kaggle crowdsourcing contest platform, most of whom are graduate students in related fields or work as data analysts. The platform’s participants are eager to conduct data development and improve their analytical techniques in the real world by participating in crowdsourcing contests. Therefore, the participants’ individual creativity and self-efficacy are highly representative. As for the individual creativity of participants, we use the total score of participants on the online crowdsourcing platform to measure individual creativity. As for the individual work engagement and self-efficacy, we investigate participants’ physiological engagement, emotional engagement, cognitive engagement, domain task self-efficacy and interactive learning self-efficacy through online questionnaire survey.
The results of empirical analysis show that:(a) work engagement of participants in network crowdsourcing plays an important role in individual creativity directly, and both emotional engagement and cognitive engagement have significant positive effects on individual creativity, while physiological engagement has a significant negative effect on individual creativity. This indicates that if the developer of online crowdsourcing wants to stimulate the creativity of the mass participants, only focusing on the physiological input of time, energy and other aspects will not necessarily improve their creativity. More importantly, it needs to stimulate the emotional and cognitive input of the participants, so as to contribute to the creativity. (b) Participants’ self-efficacy has a significant positive effect on individual creativity directly on the network crowdsourcing contest platform, among which the promoting effect of domain task self-efficacy is stronger than that of interactive learning self-efficacy. This indicates that the higher the perceived self-efficacy of individuals, the more likely they are to succeed in carrying out creative activities. Through the investigation of the self-efficacy perception of participants, the crowdsourcing platform can select public participants with high domain task self-efficacy, so as to obtain participants with high level of creativity and ultimately improve the innovation performance of the overall crowdsourcing system. (c) Work engagement plays the mediating role between self-efficacy and creativity, and the influence path is: domain task self-efficacy→emotional engagement /cognitive engagement→creativity; interactive learning self-efficacy→cognitive engagement→creativity. (d) Participants’ self-efficacy also plays the mediating role between work engagement and creativity, and the influence path is: physiological engagement→domain task self-efficacy/ interactive learning self-efficacy→creativity; emotional engagement→interactive learning self-efficacy→creativity; cognitive engagement→domain task self-efficacy/ interactive learning self-efficacy→creativity. This indicates that the individual’s sense of self-efficacy will arouse his enthusiasm to participate in the contests and increase his involvement in the crowdsourcing contests, thus affecting the creativity and performance of the participants. At the same time, the degree of work engagement of an individual will also increase his confidence in the field of online crowdsourcing contests, improve his sense of self-efficacy, and further improve his level of creativity.
From the above analyses, we can see that two ways are available to improve the creativity of the general public. On the one hand, the business should provide competitive bonus incentives and the crowdsourcing platform should design diversified crowdsourcing tasks to attract a large number of participants and improve the work input of online crowdsourcing participants. On the other hand, the self-efficacy of network crowdsourcing participants should be continuously cultivated. Participants with a high sense of self-efficacy will have a certain degree of confidence in completing the crowdsourcing task and increase their input in the crowdsourcing task, which will help them give full play to their high level of creativity and improve the overall innovation efficiency of the crowdsourcing system.

Key words: creativity, network crowdsourcing, work engagement, self-efficacy, mediating effect