Don't mess with the crowd! The emergence and management of crowdsourcing disasters

This paper contributes to a more holistic picture of social conflict in crowdsourcing initiatives and thereby deepens the understanding of the risks and downsides. It explores the sources, formation, patterns, and dynamics of conflicts and further investigates strategies for successful conflict management in online environments. Based on a real-field setting of a crowdsourcing contest, procedural, distributive and interactive fairness violations were found to trigger conflict. Moreover, results show that claimants “frame” perceived injustice and spread it across the boundaries of the crowdsourcing platform to influence and mobilize adherents. Group affiliation and herding behavior generate social dynamics that may lead to viral spread and contagious adoption. By investigating the consequences of conflict management practices the theoretical understanding of conflict avoidance and de-escalation is deepened. We provide managerial implications for the handling of crowdsourcing initiatives, and illustrate recommendations for hosting organizations.