Received: 20 April 2020 Revised: 7 May 2021 Accepted: 2 June 2021

DOI: 10.1111/caim.12449

REGULAR ARTICLE

Employee behaviours beyond innovators in internal

crowdsourcing: What do employees do in internal
crowdsourcing, if not innovating, and why?

Michela Beretta | Helle Alsted Søndergaard

Department of Management, Aarhus

University, Aarhus, Denmark
Correspondence
Michela Beretta, Department of Management,
Aarhus University, Fuglesangs Alle 4, 8210
Aarhus, Denmark.
Email: micbe@mgmt.au.dk
Firms increasingly implement internal crowdsourcing to access the creative inputs of
their wider crowd of distributed employees. Although internal crowdsourcing initia-
tives have attracted increasing attention from research, there is still a limited under-
standing about employee participation in these platforms. Previous studies have
mainly focused on the participation of employees as innovators, disregarding other
forms of employee participation occurring in these interactive platforms. Building on
the literatures on employee-driven innovation and motivation, the main goal of this
study is to investigate the behaviours performed by employees to support and refine
others' ideas and their underlying motivations to do so, thus going beyond the role of
innovators. Based on data collected from an internal crowdsourcing platform of a
large European organization, we combine cluster analysis, social network analysis,
interpretative content analysis and qualitative interviews to explore the content of
employees' supporting behaviours in these initiatives and their underlying motiva-
tions. Overall, by looking at what employees contribute in these initiatives and why,
this study contributes to generate a more comprehensive understanding of how
internal crowds can be leveraged not only for idea generation but also for the sup-
port and refinement of others' ideas. Implications for innovation management
research and practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS
crowdsourcing, employee innovation, idea management, ideation, social network analysis,
user innovation and communities

1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N strategically relevant ideas that better align with the firm strategy
compared with external crowds (Malhotra et al., 2017). As such,
Internal crowdsourcing has received increasing attention from both developing a better understanding of internal crowdsourcing as a
research and practice. These platforms enable the gathering of ideas channel to foster a broader employee involvement in ideation activi-
and feedback from a wider crowd of distributed employees (Björk ties becomes relevant. Nevertheless, the use of crowdsourcing within
et al., 2010; Malhotra et al., 2017). Employees represent an important the organizational boundaries is a less understood phenomenon
source of innovation for firms (Terwiesch & Ulrich, 2009). Although (Malhotra et al., 2017).
internal crowds tend to be less diverse and adept to generate novel Studies that have investigated the participation of employees in
ideas compared with external crowds (Poetz & Schreier, 2012), internal crowdsourcing have mostly focused on their role of idea gen-
employees still possess an in-depth understanding of the organiza- erators, primarily shedding light on characteristics and behaviours
tional context which enable them to generate more feasible and leading to the generation of innovative ideas (Björk &

542 © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/caim Creat Innov Manag. 2021;30:542–562.
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
Magnusson, 2009; Deichmann & van den Ende, 2014). However, it is
increasingly common for firms to integrate community functionalities
into these platforms, in the form of voting and commenting (Haller
et al., 2011; Hutter et al., 2011; Malhotra et al., 2017). These func-
tionalities make these platforms interactive, enabling new forms of
online participation and collaboration to emerge. This implies that
employees can participate in internal crowdsourcing not only by gen-
erating ideas but also by supporting others' ideas and by contributing
to their further refinement, thus assuming supporting behaviours for
innovation (Beretta, 2019). For instance, the interactive character of
these platforms enables employees to engage in supporting behav-
iours through the submission of different types of feedback to help
refine others' ideas. Yet current research has not systematically
explored employee participation in internal crowdsourcing and, relat-
edly, the content of the feedback provided by employees when
engaging in refining and supporting others' ideas.
Our study draws on the literatures on employee-driven innova-
tion (EDI) (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006; Høyrup et al., 2012; Perry-
Smith & Mannucci, 2017) and motivation (Amabile, 1997; Grant &
Berg, 2012) to explore the supporting behaviours enacted by
employees in internal crowdsourcing and their underlying motivations
to do so. We thus address the following questions: ‘Which supporting
behaviours do employees assume to encourage and refine others'
ideas in internal crowdsourcing? And why do employees engage in
these supporting behaviours?’ We follow previous studies that have
combined qualitative and quantitative approaches to identify different
types of behaviours and contributions in online settings (Füller
et al., 2014; Moser et al., 2013). To address our research questions,
we employ a mixed method approach that combines cluster analysis,
social network analysis, interpretative content analysis and qualitative
interviews. Based on measures developed from the social network
analysis, we conducted a cluster analysis to identify distinct types
(clusters) of supporting behaviours performed by employees in inter-
nal crowdsourcing. We then performed additional analyses to unveil
the content of the feedback provided by each identified employee
type (through an interpretative content analysis) and their underlying
motivations to engage in these supporting behaviours (through inter-
views). Such combination of methods is important in order to unveil
not only the patterns of interactions conducive to the emergence of
specific supporting behaviours but also their actual meaning and con-
tent (Moser et al., 2013).
Building on this, we argue that investigating employee participa-
tion in internal crowdsourcing, both in terms of supporting behaviours
and motivations, is important for two reasons. First, as internal
crowdsourcing platforms are increasingly collaborative, it is important
for both research and practice to better understand how the broader
crowd of employees can be leveraged for the refinement of others'
ideas by looking at what employees actually contribute in these plat-
forms. In fact, many firms have realized that engaging employees only
in the generation of ideas restricts participation in these platforms
(Malhotra et al., 2017). Many employees may not have new ideas to
submit, but they still possess relevant knowledge and expertise
to help refine and move forward others' ideas (Malhotra et al., 2017).
543
As such, understanding the types of supporting behaviours employees
engage in can provide useful insights to managers on how to use
crowdsourcing initiatives in a more collaborative manner. Second, and
relatedly, this also calls for a better understanding of employees' moti-
vations to engage in these supporting behaviours. Most research has
focused on unveiling the motivations of individuals to participate in
external crowdsourcing initiatives (Dahlander et al., 2019). These
motivations, however, may not necessarily apply to an internal organi-
zational context (Wendelken et al., 2014; Zuchowski et al., 2016). Fur-
thermore, the few studies that have focused on employee motivation
in the context of internal crowdsourcing have either investigated ini-
tiatives that restrict employee participation to idea generation activi-
ties (Fairbank & Williams, 2001) or have not distinguished between
types of participation (Wendelken et al., 2014). As such, we have lim-
ited knowledge about what drives employees to engage in supporting
and refining others' ideas in these platforms.
Our study provides a number of contributions to innovation
research. First, we extend and complement studies on internal
crowdsourcing (Björk & Magnusson, 2009; Malhotra et al., 2017;
Stieger et al., 2012) by providing a more comprehensive understand-
ing of employee participation in these platforms. Our findings show
that employees engage in five supporting behaviours (innovators,
socializers, legitimizers, passive evaluators and passive observers) and
that these behaviours differ in the content of the feedback provided
to refine and support others' ideas. Furthermore, we show how these
supporting behaviours are linked to the selection outcome of the
ideas generated. This has important implications for crowdsourcing
research, as it indicates that the supporting behaviours enacted by
employees indeed are important for the elaboration and refinement of
ideas, increasing their chances of moving forward. Moreover, we
show that intrinsic motivations such as altruism and organizational cit-
izenship play a major role in driving employees to engage in
supporting and refining others' ideas. Second, our study contributes
to the literature on EDI. We address recent calls for how EDI is
enacted in web-enabled platforms (Bäckström & Lindberg, 2019;
Høyrup et al., 2018). While EDI research has focused on how ordinary
employees voluntarily engage in innovation activities beyond their
formal work responsibilities, such engagement has only been investi-
gated in offline settings. We extend this research by generating new
insights on the types of supporting behaviours the broader crowd of
employees voluntarily enact in online crowdsourcing platforms. From
a managerial perspective, our findings provide important guidelines to
innovation managers for how to design interactive and collaborative
crowdsourcing platforms that enable the engagement of employees in
the support and refinement of others' ideas.
2 | THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1 | Internal crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is defined as the outsourcing of innovation-related
tasks, such as idea generation, to a wider crowd of distributed
544
individuals (Dahlander et al., 2019). Crowdsourcing studies have, so
far, mostly focused on the engagement of external crowds and their
contributions (Dahlander et al., 2019; Füller et al., 2014), while placing
less attention on the involvement of employees. However, recent
studies highlight that crowdsourcing can also be applied internally to
channel the ideas and expertise of firms' own employees (Malhotra
et al., 2017; Zuchowski et al., 2016). Internal crowdsourcing enables
firms to bridge intraorganizational boundaries and involve a larger
crowd of employees beyond R&D in ideation activities
(Pohlisch, 2020). It thus differs from traditional innovation practices
because it entails self-selection, as the wider crowd of employees can
voluntarily decide to participate in ideation beyond their formal work
responsibilities (Malhotra et al., 2017). Moreover, differently from tra-
ditional innovation practices, crowdsourcing entails the participation
of a large crowd of employees. This is why internal crowdsourcing is
typically used by firms with a large size, as there is the potential to
access the knowledge and expertise of employees working across var-
ious locations and functions in the organization (Björk et al., 2010).
Internal crowdsourcing differs from external crowdsourcing initia-
tives on a number of aspects. While the aim of external
crowdsourcing is to access more distant knowledge (Dahlander
et al., 2019), internal crowdsourcing is typically used by firms to con-
duct a local search for ideas, remaining in the vicinity of the firm's cur-
rent knowledge base (Simula & Ahola, 2014). In fact, employees
possess localized knowledge and an in-depth understanding of the
organizational context, which enable them to generate ideas that
more closely link to the strategy and objectives of the firm compared
with external crowds (Kesting and Ulhøi, 2010; Malhotra et al., 2017;
Simula & Ahola, 2014). As such, there is less potential to use internal
crowdsourcing for the generation of radical ideas (Björk et al., 2010;
Simula & Ahola, 2014). Moreover, differently from external
crowdsourcing, long-term employment relationships exist between
employees and the firm, with interactions among employees being
work-related and directed at generating and refining ideas as part of
the firm innovation strategy (Björk et al., 2010; Wendelken
et al., 2014; Zuchowski et al., 2016). Internal crowdsourcing is charac-
terized by higher levels of goal congruence and shared purpose than
external crowdsourcing, as the interests of employees tend to be
more closely aligned with the interests of the firm with respect to
innovation (Simula & Ahola, 2014). As employees are part of the same
organization, implicit expectations and norms of helping and
supporting the innovative efforts of other colleagues may be present
(Tortoriello et al., 2015), something that further distinguishes internal
crowdsourcing from external crowdsourcing. However, the use of
internal crowdsourcing can also create risks such as feelings of work
overload for employees from having to engage in yet another
work activity, problems of getting buy-in from employees or middle
managers and creating discontent if generated ideas are not properly
handled by the firm (Malhotra et al., 2017).
The collaborative and interactive character of internal
crowdsourcing has received increasing research attention. This is dis-
cussed with respect to the possibility to engage all employees across
the organization in refining others' ideas, thus going beyond their
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
mere participation in idea generation activities (Beretta, 2019;
Malhotra et al., 2017; Stieger et al., 2012). Employees can comple-
ment ideas with additional feedback prior to their selection through
their commenting activities on the platform, in this way assuming
supporting behaviours (Adamczyk et al., 2012). Ideas submitted to
these platforms are often ‘raw materials’, not being sufficiently elabo-
rated, and thus may benefit from additional feedback from employees
to become more detailed proposals. Such feedback can also better
inform managers when making selection decisions (Beretta, 2019).
Nevertheless, how employees engage in the refinement of others'
ideas and the content of the feedback provided by them have been
investigated only to a limited extent. Most studies focus on the feed-
back provided by firms to submitted ideas, while disregarding peer
feedback (Deichmann & van den Ende, 2014; Piezunka &
Dahlander, 2019). The few studies that examine the feedback pro-
vided by employees in internal crowdsourcing have mainly focused on
the positive/negative character of such feedback, the timing of the
feedback or the diverse backgrounds of the feedback providers
(Beretta, 2019; Chen et al., 2019), thus only providing limited insights
on this aspect.
Moreover, the interactive character of crowdsourcing opens up
opportunities for firms to involve the wider crowd of employees in
decision-making activities (Di Vincenzo et al., 2020). Through a voting
system, employees can participate in the selection of ideas, signalling
their endorsement and support toward promising ones (Malhotra
et al., 2017). The use of a voting system represents a way to leverage
the expertise of the wider crowd of employees to assess the potential
of ideas in early stages of the filtering process, in this way reducing
the cognitive burden for experts (Hutter et al., 2017). Employee
engagement in voting activities is, however, typically discussed as rep-
resenting a less demanding form of participation, entailing the invest-
ment of less cognitive resources and efforts compared with
engagement in commenting activities, which entails greater efforts in
order to help refine others' ideas (Hutter et al., 2017).
Overall, studies on internal crowdsourcing highlight that the
broader crowd of employees can be involved not only in the genera-
tion of ideas but also in the further refinement and support of others'
ideas. However, these supporting behaviours (and their meaning and
content) have been explored only to a limited extent. In order to gen-
erate more in-depth insights on this aspect, we draw on research
on EDI.
2.2 | Employee-driven innovation
Internal crowdsourcing can be related to the broader phenomenon of
EDI. Unlike traditional innovation approaches that focus primarily on
employees with innovation-related duties and expertise (such as R&D
employees), EDI research focuses on the voluntary involvement of
ordinary employees in innovation activities, going beyond their formal
work responsibilities (Høyrup et al., 2012). Much EDI research has
focused on how ordinary employees engage voluntarily in idea gener-
ation activities (Axtell et al., 2000). However, there has been
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
increasing interest in investigating the involvement of ordinary
employees in other phases of the innovation process, such as idea
development, selection, promotion and implementation (Høyrup
et al., 2012; Kesting and Ulhøi, 2010; Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017).
When it comes to idea development, EDI research highlights the
importance of the social processes underlying innovation activities,
pointing to the interactions between employees as an important unit of
analysis, as these interactions facilitate the combination of diverse
knowledge and expertise (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006; Perry-Smith &
Mannucci, 2017). Different studies have investigated the types of
supporting behaviours employees voluntarily engage in to help refine
and support others' ideas (Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017), thus infor-
mally performing the function of assisting their colleagues' innovative
efforts (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006; Obstfeld, 2005). This is especially
discussed with respect to employee engagement in feedback seeking
and feedback giving behaviours to help other colleagues. For instance,
Hargadon and Bechky (2006) identified four activities performed by
employees during engagement in idea elaboration: help seeking
(soliciting inputs from others and inviting them to join the innovative
effort), help giving (providing needed assistance that responded to
requests for help), reflective framing (providing inputs that enabled
to give new meanings and perspectives to others' contributions) and
reinforcing (supporting and acknowledging the inputs provided by
others, both in the form of help seeking, help giving and reflective fram-
ing). Obstfeld (2005) distinguished between employees informally act-
ing as major contributors, playing a key role with their feedback in
shaping others' ideas, and minor contributors, who were involved only to
a limited extent in the refinement of others' ideas. During the idea elab-
oration phase, employees can also informally contribute by providing
different forms of feedback, such as emotional support to show their
endorsement toward others' ideas, positive feedback to highlight the
key benefits of an idea, constructive feedback to help improve others'
ideas and negative feedback to highlight certain limitations of an idea
(Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017). Moreover, employees can informally
assume championing roles to support and promote others' ideas and
attract attention and legitimacy toward them, in the attempt to signal
their value to other organizational members (Howell & Boies, 2004).
Taken together, EDI research suggests that, in addition to the role
of ideators, ordinary employees voluntarily perform different
supporting behaviours to contribute to the refinement and support of
others' ideas. However, these supporting behaviours have only been
explored in offline settings (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006). Recent stud-
ies emphasize the need to investigate employees' enactment of EDI,
especially when enabled by web-based tools, as in the case of internal
crowdsourcing (Bäckström & Lindberg, 2019; Høyrup et al., 2018).
We argue that internal crowdsourcing represents a relevant setting to
explore supporting behaviours that offline settings offer few opportu-
nities to study: namely, social contexts organized in such a way that
geographically distributed employees, in many cases being strangers,
can voluntarily support one another's innovative efforts. This is mainly
due to the wide and open scope of these initiatives, which enable
employees working in different geographical locations and functions,
who typically lack opportunities to establish innovation-related
545
connections, to interact with each other and contribute to others'
ideas. These platforms thus act as ‘loci of social connections’, enabling
new types of interactions to be established among widely distributed
employees. This also suggests the importance of unveiling the under-
lying motivations driving employees to engage in internal
crowdsourcing to support and refine others' ideas.
2.3 | Employees' motivations to engage in
innovation
A widely adopted distinction to understand the motivation of
employees to engage in innovation activities relates to intrinsic and
extrinsic motivations (Amabile, 1997). Intrinsic motivation relates to
the enjoyment of performing the task itself (Amabile, 1997). Studies
highlight that fun and enjoyment, autonomy (opportunity to develop
ideas), opportunities to connect with other employees in the organiza-
tion and feelings of empowerment (opportunity to participate in the
development and selection of others' ideas) constitute key intrinsic
motivations that drive employees to engage in innovation activities
(Grant & Berg, 2012; Smith et al., 2012; Wasko & Faraj, 2000). Studies
also point to prosocial behaviours such as altruism (the desire to
voluntarily help others) and organizational citizenship as important
intrinsic motivators for employee engagement in innovation (Grant &
Berg, 2012). In this case, employees are motivated by the desire to
contribute to the organization, acting as ‘good citizens’. Employees
characterized by greater organizational citizenship behaviours are
argued to be more sensitive to the needs of other colleagues and thus
more motivated to help them (Constant et al., 1996). This construct
has, in fact, been related to greater willingness to assist and help the
work of other colleagues, as well as to greater identification with, loy-
alty and commitment toward an organization (Podsakoff et al., 2000).
Another important intrinsic factor relates to generalized reciprocity.
Generalized reciprocity ‘emerges when people have positive regard
for the social system in which requests for help are embedded and
show respect for it through offering help’ (Constant et al., 1996,
p. 122). In this case, there may be implicit expectations that, by
providing support and feedback to other colleagues, employees would
receive support in return.
Extrinsic motivation is typically driven by factors stemming from
outside the task (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Studies show that monetary
compensations or rewards, signalling/career-related issues (the possi-
bility to signal own competence to others to achieve, for instance,
promotion), opportunity to enhance own reputation, individual-related
benefits (possibility to enhance own expertise and learn from others)
and opportunity to gain recognition from other colleagues and the
firm constitute important extrinsic motivators for employees to partic-
ipate in innovation activities (Amo, 2006; Montoro-S

anchez
et al., 2011). Moreover, employees may be motivated to participate in
innovation because they are expected to do so by their superiors
(Zuchowski et al., 2016).
Overall, studies focusing on EDI highlight that different intrinsic
and extrinsic motivations drive employees to contribute to innovation
546
activities (Hammond et al., 2011). In the context of crowdsourcing,
studies have shown that different types of intrinsic and extrinsic moti-
vations play an important role in driving individuals to participate
(Dahlander et al., 2019). However, much crowdsourcing literature has
focused on the motivations of external crowds to participate in exter-
nal crowdsourcing, while placing limited attention on understanding
the motivations of employees to participate in internal crowdsourcing.
The few studies that have investigated employee motivation in the
context of internal crowdsourcing have either focused on initiatives
where employee participation is restricted to idea generation activities
(Axtell et al., 2000; Fairbank & Williams, 2001; Frese et al., 1999) or
have not distinguished between types of participation across phases
of the innovation process (Wendelken et al., 2014). Yet, it is argued
that, in order to generate more in-depth insights into employee partic-
ipation in internal crowdsourcing, motivations need to be linked to
the types of behaviours assumed by employees when participating in
these initiatives (Battistella & Nonino, 2012). As such, we have limited
knowledge about which motivations play a major role in driving
employees to engage in the refinement and support of others' ideas in
these platforms, going beyond idea generation (Zuchowski
et al., 2016).
3 | D AT A
3.1 | Research setting
We collected data from an internal crowdsourcing platform
implemented by a large, international organization operating in the
manufacturing sector. The organization operates in more than
10 countries and has more than 16,000 employees worldwide. The
platform was launched in April 2015. It is considered an additional
channel to encourage innovation and collaboration among employees
distributed across different functions, locations and hierarchical levels.
Although participation is voluntary for employees, the use of this ini-
tiative is encouraged and promoted throughout the organization,
being supported by top management. The platform was managed by
the continuous improvement department, contributing to the firm's
value creation activities. A team of innovation managers is assigned to
its management, being responsible for the development of participa-
tion guidelines and incentive schemes, mainly based on providing rec-
ognition through virtual badges and points. Monetary rewards are not
provided to employees for their participation. Moreover, the virtual
badges and points are not linked to receiving gifts or other compensa-
tions, being purely symbolic. The firm saw them as a way to provide
visibility and recognition in the platform based on employees' contri-
butions. The platform is designed around four main areas to favour
the generation of strategically relevant ideas aligned with the needs
of the organization: improvement of existing products and services,
creation of new products, improvement of internal processes and
environmental sustainability. Finally, the system is designed to be col-
laborative and interactive through the use of community functionali-
ties, such as commenting and voting. This was considered important
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
for the further discussion of ideas in an open setting and thus to fos-
ter collaborative relationships among employees.
To better understand employees' supporting behaviours in inter-
nal crowdsourcing, we extracted log-file data from the platform over
the course of 11 months, since its inception in April 2015.1 All col-
lected data were collapsed into one dataset. These data include 1744
employees who participated to the platform by generating ideas
and/or by providing comments or votes to others' ideas.2 Subscribers
who never participated to the platform through any of these activities
were discarded from the analysis. A total of 1156 ideas were gener-
ated in the platform, with 143 ideas being selected by experts for fur-
ther development and implementation. A selection decision entails
that the assigned expert becomes the implementation owner, being
responsible for bringing the idea to realization.
4 | METHODS
We employed a mixed method approach, based on the combination
of cluster analysis, social network analysis, qualitative interpretative
analysis and qualitative interviews.
First, social network analysis constituted an important tool to
generate insights into employees' interactions in the internal
crowdsourcing platform (Füller et al., 2014). We view this online plat-
form as loci of social connections, where relationships between
employees emerge through their commenting and voting activities.
Second, we conducted a cluster analysis to identify the types of
supporting behaviours enacted online by employees. Third, we
focused on unveiling how the behaviours identified through cluster
analysis differ in their content and meaning by applying a qualitative
interpretative analysis of the comments submitted by employees
(Moser et al., 2013). Finally, we conducted interviews with some of
these employees to gain a better understanding of their underlying
motivations for contributing to the support and refinement of others'
ideas. Overall, the combination of these multiple methods, both quan-
titative and qualitative, is beneficial to increase the trustworthiness
and reliability of the data (Füller et al., 2014). It also provides a more
comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of employees'
supporting behaviours, based not only on the structural dimensions of
their interactions but also on their actual meaning and content (Moser
et al., 2013). Such holistic understanding would thus not be possible if
one would use only one these methods.
4.1 | Quantitative methodology—Employees'
supporting behaviours
Following previous studies (Füller et al., 2014; Moser et al., 2013), we
used social network analysis to identify the employees' supporting
behaviours emerging in internal crowdsourcing. We considered the
existence of a tie between two employees if one employee provided
at least one comment or vote to an idea of another employee. Com-
menting and voting indicate the extent to which employees engage in
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
supporting behaviours toward others' ideas. A commonly used net-
work measure is degree centrality, which measures participants' activ-
ity levels and visibility (Füller et al., 2014). We operationalized out-
degree centrality as the number of comments/votes posted by an
employee to others' ideas. In-degree centrality is operationalized as the
number of comments/votes received by employees to their ideas
(Füller et al., 2014). Furthermore, we included coparticipation intensity
to measure the degree to which employees interact with others non-
randomly (Moser et al., 2013). We constructed an affiliation network
where a tie between two employees exists if they have commented
on the same ideas. The more ideas two employees share, the stronger
their link. These measures were calculated using the UCINET software
(Borgatti et al., 2002). Finally, we included the number of ideas submit-
ted by each employee as an additional measure to capture engage-
ment in idea generation activities. Figure A1 and Table A1 provide an
overview of the network analysis and measures. For instance,
Figure A1 shows the network configuration with groups of employees
occupying a core position within the platform and others occupying a
more peripheral position. Employees in the core of the community are
highly connected to each other (thus intensively engaging in providing
and receiving comments and/or votes), while many marginal partici-
pants only engage in such activities to a limited extent. This indicates
that employees differ in the way they interact and participate,
supporting our assumption of the existence of different types of
employee behaviours. This thus provides support for conducting a
cluster analysis.
4.2 | Cluster analysis
Performing a cluster analysis is important in our study to identify dis-
tinct groups of employees (clusters) based on their activities on the
platform. That is, this procedure enables to categorize employees into
a number of groups which are, in relation to the variables under inves-
tigation, as homogenous as possible (minimizing the variance within
clusters) and at the same time as different as possible (maximizing the
variance between clusters). Hence, the use of cluster analysis enables
us to identify distinct types of supporting behaviours performed by
employees in internal crowdsourcing: each cluster includes employees
who share similar supporting behaviours. The cluster analysis serves
as a basis for performing additional analyses to better understand the
content of each identified supporting behaviour. We used the devel-
oped network measures to perform a two-step cluster analysis (Moser
et al., 2013) and thus categorize the behaviours exhibited by
employees into distinct clusters. We first employed the Ward's
method based on squared Euclidean distances, a widely used hierar-
chical clustering technique (Ward, 1963). We used the Calinski and
Harabasz pseudo-F-statistic and the Duda and Hart pseudo-T2 values
to identify the number of clusters (Füller et al., 2014). This procedure
suggested four to six-cluster solutions. We then employed the non-
hierarchical (k-means) clustering procedure, where we used the cen-
troids obtained from the Ward's clustering solutions as the initial
starting points (Füller et al., 2014). We calculated the Adjusted Rand
547
Index (ARI) in STATA to test the accuracy of each cluster solution
(Hubert & Arabie, 1985). This test indicates that the four-cluster solu-
tion is characterized by lower levels of accuracy (0.76 per cent) com-
pared with the five- and six-cluster solutions (reporting similar levels
of accuracy: 0.82 per cent and 0.88 per cent, respectively). We also
relied on the permtab command in STATA as an additional measure to
compare the cluster solutions, which seeks to maximize the Cohen's κ
as an index of agreement (Halpin, 2017). We obtained similar results,
with the four-cluster solution being the less accurate (κ = .78), while
the five- and six-cluster solutions are very similar in their accuracy
(κ = .83 and .84, respectively). We noticed that the five- and six-
cluster solutions were very similar in their interpretation. The only dif-
ference was that the six-cluster solution created a small additional
cluster that included employees who engage only to a limited extent
in the generation of ideas. However, this distinction is already cap-
tured by the clusters provided by the five-cluster solution, and the
six-cluster solution does not provide additional valuable insights on
employees' behaviours from a theoretical point of view. We follow
previous studies that highlight that, when cluster solutions report sim-
ilar levels of accuracy, the choice of the cluster solution is often a mat-
ter of what is also deemed as most interpretable and meaningful by
the researcher, and thus, it is also partly driven by researchers' judge-
ment (Fuger et al., 2017; Füller et al., 2014; Ketchen & Shook, 1996).
Hence, based on the tests of accuracy, supporting literature and the
usability for interpretation (Fuger et al., 2017; Füller et al., 2014), the -
five-cluster solution is selected for this study.
4.3 | Interpretive methodology—The content of
employees' feedback
To generate a more comprehensive understanding of employees'
supporting behaviours, we complemented the network and cluster
analyses with a qualitative interpretative analysis. This was impor-
tant to better understand the content and meaning of employees'
supporting behaviours. This analysis was based on the entire set of
comments submitted to the platform (3949). The coding process
was deductive and started with a set of predefined coding instruc-
tions and content categories. We built on the literature on EDI to
classify the content of employees' supporting behaviours with
respect to the feedback provided. More specifically, we drew inspi-
ration from the studies by Hargadon and Bechky (2006) and Perry-
Smith and Mannucci (2017). These studies highlight different types
of employees' supporting behaviours and content of the feedback
provided, enabling us to develop a more fine-grained categorization
of employees' contributions. First, we the two authors indepen-
dently and separately coded a random subset of comments (100) as
a way to pretest the developed coding scheme by reading through
the comments and dividing them into the established categories.
After this double-blind coding, we compared the codes with the aim
of detecting similarities and differences. Following Campbell
et al. (2013), in order to achieve agreement, we discussed our inter-
pretations of the coded categories to clarify differences in an effort
548 BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD

to reconcile them. Then, we adjusted the coding scheme accordingly
and refined the initial categories as we reached shared understand-
ing and agreement. This process resulted in six final categories:
emotional support, positive feedback, negative feedback, construc-
tive feedback, help seeking and help giving. After this alignment, a
third coder (an innovation management student who was trained by
the authors on these six categories) was asked to code a random
subset of comments (400) based on the revised coding scheme. A
comparison of the categories led to a Cohen's κ of .82, which is
considered a good indicator of intercoder reliability (Cohen, 1960).
The remaining comments where then coded by one of the authors.
Table 1 provides a description of the identified categories, how they
link to the mentioned studies we build upon, and illustrative
examples.

TABLE 1 Content of employees' feedback

Related categories from

Category Description
Emotional support Comments that express support for an idea
without providing reasons for support.
Positive feedback Comments that express support for an idea,
providing detailed reasons for support and
elaborating on its benefits.
Constructive Comments that focus on further elaborating
feedback an idea and others' contributions by adding
additional perspectives and suggestions for
improvement, sharing knowledge and
experiences about specific practices and
approaches that may be useful, and linking
the idea to similar ideas for further
expansion and knowledge recombination.
Negative Comments that highlight limitations and
feedback issues related to an idea but still having an
informational content.
Help seeking Opening up the discussion by asking
questions about an idea to solicit
clarifications or further insights.
Help giving Comments that link together other parts of
employees' communications. They include
helping (i.e., providing replies to requests
for clarification with the required
information), thanking employees for their
inputs, soliciting information on the status
of the idea and acknowledging previous
contributions by summarizing important
inputs.
literature
Emotional support
Perry-Smith and
Mannucci (2017)
Positive feedback
Perry-Smith and
Mannucci (2017)
Constructive feedback
Perry-Smith and
Mannucci (2017)
Reflective reframing
Hargadon and
Bechky (2006)
Negative feedback
Perry-Smith and
Mannucci (2017)
Help seeking
Hargadon and
Bechky (2006)
Help giving
Hargadon and
Bechky (2006)
Reinforcing
Hargadon and
Bechky (2006)
Illustrative examples
‘Great idea!’
‘What a brilliant idea xxx. I definitely think
that this idea deserves more attention’.
‘Wow, it's really a step up for building
creativity. Animal is very close to us and
can help the child better understand habits
of this animal, because during assembly will
have discussion with parents about this
animal’.
‘Ambient RF, very interesting … Low (no)
power xxx could potentially enable
unlimited smart uses for our xxx platform
both within play and other …’
‘This looks really cool! I saw something similar
a while ago, where a Japanese company
recycled their bras into shopping bags
(while still using them as bras)—maybe not
the most realistic use, but the idea of using
waste to create a reusable bag is definitely
useful’. http://inhabitat.com/no-eco-
shopping-bag-bra/
‘While I think tapping into popular shows and
movies has been a proven boom for xxx,
I'm not sure all of those shows mentioned
match up with well the xxx values. Here in
our store we have had a decidedly divided
reception to the xxx with a fair amount of
parents commenting that the show is not
something they want their children to
watch’.
‘Hi xxx, thanks for sharing your idea with us! I
personally love Airbnb and have gotten
great uses out of it—often much more
unique and affordable experiences than
when booking hotels. However, I also know
that it can be unreliable in terms of service
for some, so I'm wondering if you see this
used as on an individual basis or managed
through HR/Facilities?’
‘Hi xxx, yes, there is a KPI board they are
working to make xxx standard, is not
optimal for quick overview and still need a
lot of work to make it a perfect
replacement. Further, the department have
to be a global department before they can
use it, otherwise they will be declined. A
digital board brings so much more to a
department and the management, and a
much better overview …’
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD 549

4.4 | Qualitative interviews—Underlying them. This resulted in the identification of two final aggregated
employees' motivations dimensions: intrinsic motivations and extrinsic motivations. Figure A2
shows our data analysis process, including first-order codes, second-
For each identified employee behaviour, we contacted and inter- order themes and aggregated dimensions.
viewed a number of employees with the aim of better understanding
their specific motivations to participate. Our aim was to especially
uncover the motivations of employees to engage in supporting behav- 5 | FI ND I NG S
iours, going beyond the generation of ideas. In each cluster, we
selected participants to interview who were ‘representative’, engag- 5.1 | Initial categorization of employees'
ing in the behaviours characteristic of that cluster. We contacted supporting behaviours
30 employees in total who participated more or less actively in the
platform across the five clusters. However, only 14 employees As a first step, we present the employee behaviours identified based
accepted to be interviewed. Hence, we conducted a total of on the cluster analysis. This classification enables us to present in the
14 semistructured interviews with participants. The interviews lasted following sections the key findings of this study, related to the con-
between 15 and 45 min, were recorded and transcribed to ensure tent of employees' supporting behaviours and underlying motivations.
transparency. The interviews were very focused—that is, our inter- Table 2 reports the means, standard deviations and number of obser-
view guide was short and focused solely on the motivational aspects vations for each cluster, while Figure 1 provides an illustration of the
of employee participation, in line with our objective. We asked identified behaviours.
employees open questions with a focus on getting insights into their
main motivations—that is, why they participated in the platform to
support and refine others' ideas and their experiences. There was
quite some variation between employees with respect to how much
they elaborated on their answers. Table A2 provides a more detailed
overview of the interviewees.
Our data analysis was characterized by both inductive and deduc-
tive approaches and entailed different cycles of coding, inspired by
Gioia et al. (2013). In the first cycle, we conducted a more open,
inductive coding where we read through the interview transcripts to
identify employees' motivations to participate in supporting behav-
iours. We coded these motivations either by directly using the terms
provided by the interviewees or a label that summarized what was
said by them. We started with a more open approach because we
wanted to capture all the different motivations mentioned by
employees. In the subsequent cycles of coding, we iteratively consul-
ted relevant literatures to aggregate, refine and categorize the identi-
fied codes (Miles & Huberman, 1994). We built on EDI studies on
employee engagement in innovation to better refine and label our
F I G U R E 1 Employee supporting behaviours. The y axis reports
codes. In the third cycle of coding, we focused on comparing the iden- the (standardized) mean values from Table 2 [Colour figure can be
tified second-order themes and on detecting relationships among viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

TABLE 2 Cluster analysis

Employee type Innovators Legitimizers Socializers Passive evaluators Passive observers

Out-degree comments 20.49 (2.65) 1.21 (1.30) 4.45 (2.37) 0.45 (0.78) 0.148 (0.173)
Out-degree votes 12.75 (1.26) 4.55 (2.27) 1.63 (2.05) 1.16 (1.45) 0.204 (0.30)
In-degree comments 18.77 (2.56) 2.53 (1.6) 3.073 (2.69) 0.96 (1.01) 0.19 (0.23)
In-degree votes 13.85 (2.011) 4.33 (1.95) 1.19 (1.55) 0.79 (0.81) 0.168 (0.172)
Number of ideas 18.34 (4.38) 3.64 (1.5) 1.62 (1.83) 0.905 (0.81) 0.181 (0.211)
Coparticipation intensity 13.08 (9.52) 0.73 (0.796) 5.47 (2.61) 0.423 (0.77) 0.146 (0.29)
No. of observations 3 15 21 152 1,553
Level of engagement Major contributors Major contributors Major contributors Minor contributors Minor contributors

Note: Means and standard deviations (in parentheses) of the five clusters (based on standardized variables).
550
5.1.1 | Innovators
This type of contributor represents a very small portion of employees.
These employees are the most productive idea generators in the plat-
form, playing the role of innovators. They are characterized by extreme
values in all the measures (highly above average) and thus by high levels
of participation in the platform. They also act as major contributors in
the platform, being engaged in establishing interactions with other
employees and in providing a variety of feedback to others' ideas, both
in the form of votes and comments. These contributors are popular and
visible participants in the platform as they receive a large number of
comments and votes to their ideas, thus attracting the attention of other
members. Hence, their ideas tend to be highly popular in the platform.
5.1.2 | Legitimizers
This type of participant engages actively in the platform especially by
providing votes to others' ideas. Hence, these employees act as legiti-
mizers and evaluators by providing support and endorsement to others'
ideas in order to move them forward. They play an important role in sig-
nalling to the organization which ideas are considered relevant. They
also engage in idea generation to some extent. Their ideas tend to be
quite popular within the platform as reflected by the large number of
attracted votes. Their behaviour is characterized by little engagement
in the platform in terms of providing comments to others' ideas, indicat-
ing less interest in establishing interactions with other employees.
5.1.3 | Socializers
This type of participant is also a major contributor in the platform,
being highly engaged in contributing to others' ideas through their
commenting activities. This indicates that these employees are very
social members, interested in establishing interactions with other
employees and in providing feedback to their ideas. They are also
characterized by high levels of coparticipation intensity, showing a
tendency to discuss others' ideas with the same employees. Despite
generating a moderate amount of ideas, they are able to attract a con-
siderable number of comments to their ideas (above average), thus
indicating that their ideas are quite discussed by other employees.
TABLE 3 Content of employee feedback
Comment type Innovators Legitimizers
Emotional support 16.43 10.74
Positive feedback 28.19 26.86
Constructive feedback 19.68 28.51
Help giving 26.37 27.69
Help seeking 6.49 2.48
Negative feedback 2.84 3.72
Note: Proportion of comments for each cluster. The numbers in bold highlight, for each category of feedback, where the employee type provides the
greatest proportion of comments.
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
5.1.4 | Passive evaluators
This type of participant acts as a minor contributor, participating only
to some extent in the platform by providing votes to others' ideas.
Similar to legitimizers, these employees seem interested in participat-
ing in the evaluation of others' ideas. On the other hand, they are only
to a limited extent engaged in generating ideas and in contributing to
others' ideas through their commenting activities.
5.1.5 | Passive observers
This type of participant constitutes the majority of employees partici-
pating in the platform. These employees are characterized by low
levels of engagement in commenting and voting others' ideas as well
as in generating their own ideas. They thus play the role of minor con-
tributors in supporting and refining others' ideas in the platform.
Overall, the cluster analysis reveals five types of employee behav-
iours: one small group of innovators who also act as major contribu-
tors in refining and supporting others' ideas, two other groups of
major contributors who primarily differ based on whether they
actively contribute in evaluating (legitimizers) or commenting on
others' ideas (socializers) and two groups of minor contributors who
engage in these activities only to a limited extent. The identified
behaviours thus reflect different levels of cognitive efforts invested
when engaging in internal crowdsourcing: innovators and socializers
are the employees who engage in higher effort activities such as idea
generation and commenting to refine others' ideas. Legitimizers and
passive evaluators tend to mainly engage in lower effort activities,
focusing on voting on others' ideas. In the next section, we explore
employees' contributions further by investigating the content of the
feedback provided by them through their commenting activities.
5.2 | The content of employees' feedback
Pearson and likelihood chi-square tests (p < .01) reveal significant dif-
ferences between the identified behaviours with respect to the con-
tent of the feedback provided to others' ideas (as shown in Table 3).
In general, the majority of comments provided by employees fall
into the categories of positive feedback (943 comments), constructive
Socializers Passive evaluators Passive observers
11.43 17.59 25.43
20.99 24.43 23.6
32.12 28.81 28.73
22.86 21.06 14.36
8.77 4.92 3.29
3.84 3.19 4.58
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
feedback (1122 comments) and help giving (817 comments). This
reflects a greater focus and effort of employees on providing feed-
back that can help refine others' ideas, going beyond mere emotional
support.
Innovators are highly engaged in providing different types of feed-
back to others' ideas. For instance, they provide the highest propor-
tion of positive feedback, focusing on providing detailed explanations
for why the idea is regarded as good by them. These comments can
thus be important to complement an idea and increase its understand-
ability by focusing on highlighting its potential benefits. On the other
hand, these employees provide the lowest proportion of constructive
feedback, which all the other supporting roles do to a larger degree,
both major and minor contributors. Thus, although participating only
in a limited manner, even the group of minor contributors (passive
observers and evaluators) is interested in providing helpful feedback
to their colleagues that can contribute to further improve their ideas.
Constructive feedback entails adding additional perspectives and sug-
gestions for improvement to further complement an idea, adding new
perspectives and meanings to the inputs provided by others to an
idea, sharing knowledge and experiences about specific practices that
may be useful in relation to the idea, and linking the idea to similar
ideas to favour knowledge recombination. On the other hand, innova-
tors provide the second highest proportion of comments related to
help giving, focusing on linking together inputs provided by employees
to an idea and on providing inputs that respond to requests for
clarification.
Differentiating between major and minor contributors, the results
show that especially help giving and help seeking are done to a larger
extent by the major contributors. Legitimizers, although engaging in
commenting activities only to a limited extent, provide the highest
proportion of comments related to help giving. This indicates that,
when legitimizers engage in providing comments to others' ideas, they
devote their time and efforts in assisting other colleagues by providing
replies to requests for clarification with the required information,
soliciting support from other employees and acknowledging previous
contributions (i.e., agreeing with previous comments and summarizing
the points discussed in previous conversations). Socializers show the
highest amount of constructive feedback and help seeking behaviours.
By asking questions and clarifications related to an idea, these
employees both give feedback and encourage other colleagues to pro-
vide further insights to better clarify and extend its content.
Regarding the minor contributors, passive observers provide the
highest proportion of emotional support, being engaged in providing
encouragement to their colleagues with their comments. Emotional
support is concerned with providing encouragement to other
employees for their ideas and relates to positive expressions such as
‘Great idea!’ As such, these comments do not provide content in the
form of knowledge or new perspectives but carry a certain valuation,
providing legitimacy and support to an idea. Moreover, this cluster
provides the highest proportion of negative feedback. This can also be
seen as a way for these employees to contribute to the refinement of
ideas, by highlighting certain limitations or issues that need to be con-
sidered by the ideator and other employees (see also Table 1).
551
5.3 | Distribution of employees' contributions and
impact on idea outcome
To provide further insights on employees' supporting behaviours, we
explore how often these types of contributors are present across
ideas. One dimension according to which submitted ideas differ is
their degree of elaboration, as ideas can be more or less elaborated
when they are submitted in a crowdsourcing platform. We calculated
the average length description of the ideas submitted to the platform,
and based on this average, we distinguished between ideas with a
lower and higher degree of elaboration (below and above average).
Figure 2 shows that a greater proportion of employees (across the five
clusters) engage in supporting and discussing ideas characterized by a
lower degree of elaboration in their formulation. Their inputs can thus
be important to further extend ideas during the refinement phase,
something that may help managers make more informed selection
decisions. Table A3 reports an example of an idea with a low degree
of elaboration and subsequent discussions from the different
employees to further refine it. Furthermore, we distinguished
between types of ideas, based on the four areas used by the firm to
categorize them, and explored the distribution of the identified
employee types. Figure 3 shows that all the five identified clusters
engage with a greater proportion in ideas related to internal process
improvements. This is in line with previous crowdsourcing studies,
which point to the localized knowledge held by employees (Malhotra
et al., 2017). Having an in-depth knowledge about the organizational
context, these employees can leverage their localized expertise to
provide inputs directed at improving internal processes and organiza-
tional activities.
Furthermore, we explored how the identified employee behav-
iours influence the selection outcome of the ideas generated in this
platform. This is important in order to understand to what extent the
engagement of employees in the refinement of ideas through differ-
ent supporting behaviours can help move these ideas forward in the
process, increasing their chances of becoming selected by experts.
We performed t tests to compare how the ideas that were selected
F I G U R E 2 Frequency of employee types across idea elaboration
(based on comments) [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]
552
Employee type Selected ideas (N = 143) Rejected ideas (N = 1013)
Innovators 0.42 0.42
Legitimizers 0.33 0.19
Socializers 1.30 0.77
Passive evaluators 1.20 0.88
Passive observers 0.99 0.91
Note: Mean values are reported in the table.
**
p < .05.
and rejected by experts differ in the distribution of employees'
supporting behaviours (see Table 4).
The results show a significant difference between selected and
rejected ideas for many of the employees' supporting behaviours.
That is, ideas that were selected by experts tend to have, on average,
a greater number of passive evaluators, legitimizers and socializers
participating in their refinement through their commenting activities
prior to selection. One explanation could be that passive evaluators
and legitimizers, despite engaging in commenting activities to a limited
extent, focus their efforts on refining those ideas that they deem most
promising and valuable for the firm (in line with their role of evalua-
tors), especially through the provision of help giving and constructive
feedback. This may contribute to make the value of these ideas more
obvious and to help them move forward in the process. The important
role played by socializers for the elaboration of ideas prior to selection
is also indicated in the result. These employees are characterized by
the greatest proportion of constructive feedback and help seeking
comments provided to others' ideas. Such inputs may thus be valuable
to complement these ideas, increasing their chances of becoming
selected. Being highly social members, the inputs of socializers could
also help attract further attention to these ideas and gather needed
inputs and clarifications from other employees. On the other hand,
Table 4 shows that there is no significant difference between selected
and rejected ideas with respect to the participation of innovators and
passive observers. It is important to highlight that, although innova-
tors are very active, they represent a very small cluster. However, one
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
F I G U R E 3 Frequency of employee types
across categories of ideas (based on comments)
[Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.
com]
T A B L E 4 Comparing selected and
Significance level
rejected ideas with respect to the
distribution of comments from employee
**
types
**
**
possible explanation for this result could be that innovators are more
focused on generating and discussing their own ideas in the platform
rather than on contributing to refining others' ideas in a valuable man-
ner compared with the other employee types, that is, through con-
structive feedback. In relation to passive observers, these employees
are the least active in the platform, and when they engage in refining
others' ideas, they focus more on providing emotional support. This
type of feedback, although providing legitimacy, may be less useful
for the actual improvement of an idea, as it lacks informational
content.
5.4 | Motivations underpinning employees'
supporting behaviours
Our analysis of the interviews indicates that employees are motivated
to perform supporting behaviours in internal crowdsourcing driven by
both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. However, we found that
intrinsic motivations in the form of prosocial behaviours played a
major role in motivating employees to engage in supporting and refin-
ing others' ideas, being highlighted by all employees as constituting
the most important driver for their participation.
5.4.1 | Intrinsic motivations
All the identified employee types mentioned altruism as a key motiva-
tor. That is, many employees were driven by the unselfish interest in
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
helping to improve their colleagues' ideas by providing feedback to
them or in supporting others' ideas to move them forward. Many
employees highlighted that internal crowdsourcing represented a plat-
form where they could use their knowledge and expertise to help
others with their ideas. As stated by an employee: ‘If I saw something
that I thought was a good idea, and I saw a way that it could be
improved, then I wanted to contribute, add value, so that the person
who put up the idea could use it (Lean consultant)’. This not only
related to providing feedback that could extend others' ideas, but it
was also seen as important to provide support and encouragement to
others for their efforts. Helping was, in fact, seen as an important,
implicit norm of being part of the same organization. Various inter-
viewees highlighted that the firm was characterized by a very collabo-
rative culture, where assisting others' colleagues in need of help
represented an important element of such culture. Moreover,
employees in all clusters, apart from socializers, mentioned organiza-
tional citizenship as a key motivation to participate. Participation was
seen as part of the company's culture and of being a good ‘company
citizen’. In fact, being a good company citizen was linked by many
employees to the importance of helping drive innovation within the
organization: ‘It is important to participate in these four areas [the
four categories of ideas in the platform] and help drive innovation,
these areas closely relate to our main company values (Quality con-
troller)’. Many interviewees revealed a strong commitment to the
organization as a whole, pointing to the importance of collaborating
with each other for the benefit of the organization. They considered it
important to help their organization better innovate, viewing
crowdsourcing as an organizational tool/resource to support the firm's
innovation strategy. Some employees also saw participation as a natu-
ral continuation of their work role and thus as a way to further con-
tribute to innovation, by helping to advance and refine others' ideas
that could contribute to the whole organization in a valuable way. As
stated by an employee: ‘Primarily, I was reviewing ideas and trying to
provide inputs and voting for the ones I thought would be value
adding to the company (Global master trainer)’. Interestingly, despite
the platform being supported and promoted by higher level manage-
ment, none of our interviewees expressed that they participated in
the platform because they were expected or ‘forced’ to do so by their
superiors. Rather, it was emphasized that their participation was
linked to being a good company citizen and that they saw helping
others as a valuable element of being part of the same organization.
As stated by an employee: ‘Because that was in my field of expertise,
I was able to provide technical comments to an idea … if it would be
feasible, it would take too much, or would be too much out of the
box. We are [firm name] and it is important to help your own col-
leagues (Senior equipment engineer)’. This focus on prosocial behav-
iours also aligns well with the communicative content displayed by
many employees, for instance, with respect to providing constructive
or positive feedback and help giving and help seeking forms of feed-
back. Some employees also mentioned that they participated in the
platform because they saw it as a fun and engaging activity. Finally,
we found that another organizational-oriented factor driving partici-
pation related to norms of generalized reciprocity. This was mainly
553
mentioned by some socializers and innovators, who highlighted their
expectation that, by supporting other colleagues in the platform, they
would receive feedback and help on their ideas in return: ‘It was also
about providing and expecting feedback in return (Logistic engineer)’.
5.4.2 | Extrinsic motivations
Employees' motivation to participate in supporting behaviours was
also linked to receiving personal benefits. Extrinsic motivations, how-
ever, did not play a predominant role and were only mentioned by
few employees. For instance, innovators highlighted motives such as
the possibility to earn recognition and status through their contribu-
tions both from the firm and their colleagues. They especially liked
the possibility to earn virtual points and badges through their contri-
butions in the platform, in order to gain visibility. As stated by an
employee: ‘If you were commenting on ideas, you would receive a
badge as being a commentator. If your ideas were implemented, then
you would receive another badge … so you could get different badges
for different behaviors … I'm a competitive spirit I can say, and for me
it was quite rewarding to be able to see everything (Packaging engi-
neer)’. A few passive observers reported that helping others was also
a way to signal to the firm that they possessed relevant competences,
hoping for career-related opportunities. Moreover, various employees
reported that they enjoyed contributing to the platform due to an
inherent interest in innovation. They also saw participation as
an opportunity to learn more about innovation from other colleagues
as well as to enhance own expertise. For instance: ‘It was something I
started doing because I was interested in it. I thought it was interest-
ing to see new ideas (Portfolio manager)’.
6 | DI SCU SSION
Our analyses have revealed five types of behaviours voluntarily
assumed by employees when participating in internal crowdsourcing,
namely, innovators, socializers, legitimizers, passive evaluators and
passive observers. Linking these behaviours to the literature on EDI,
we observe that a small group of innovators constitute the main initia-
tors and major contributors in the platform (Obstfeld, 2005). We also
found two other types of major contributors, socializers and legiti-
mizers, who are active in the platform by providing feedback to
others' ideas through their commenting activities and by providing
support and endorsement to them both through voting and com-
menting (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006; Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017).
The minor contributors in the platform (Obstfeld, 2005), that is, the
passive evaluators and passive observers, constitute the majority of
participants and engage in these activities to a lower extent. However,
these employees are still interested in providing feedback and support
to others' ideas through their comments. Based on this categorization
of employee behaviours, our study provides three key findings. First,
we show how these behaviours differ in their content and meaning,
with employees focusing on providing different types of feedback to
554
refine others' ideas. Second, we show that employees, through their
supporting behaviours, especially focus on elaborating ideas with
lower degrees of elaboration, thus benefiting from additional perspec-
tives and inputs. We also provide initial empirical evidence for how
these supporting behaviours are linked to the selection outcome of
supported ideas. Third, we provide new insights into the underlying
motivations of employees to perform these supporting behaviours,
pointing to the important role of intrinsic motivations, especially in
the form of prosocial behaviours.
6.1 | Theoretical contributions
Our findings complement research on internal crowdsourcing. Previ-
ous studies have discussed design-related aspects (Lüttgens
et al., 2014), network structures and behaviours of employees as ide-
ators and the types of ideas generated by them (Björk &
Magnusson, 2009; Deichmann & van den Ende, 2014). Recent studies
have, however, advocated the need to better understand how firms
can leverage the potential of internal crowds for the refinement of
ideas, thus benefiting from the collaborative and interactive character
of crowdsourcing (Beretta, 2019; Malhotra et al., 2017). We comple-
ment these studies by providing a more comprehensive understanding
of the different types of behaviours enacted by employees to support
and jointly refine ideas, thus going beyond idea generation. In the fol-
lowing section, we unfold more in detail the contributions of this
study.
6.1.1 | Content of employee feedback
We contribute to the crowdsourcing literature by providing a more in-
depth understanding of the content of the feedback submitted by par-
ticipants in these platforms during the idea elaboration phase, as
called for by recent studies (Beretta, 2019; Malhotra et al., 2017;
Piezunka & Dahlander, 2015). We find that employees provide differ-
ent types of feedback to support and complement others' ideas. We
built on studies on EDI to provide a better understanding of the con-
tent of such feedback. More specifically, we found that emotional sup-
port (Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017) is to a larger degree provided by
the passive observers through short, encouraging comments that pro-
vide legitimacy to certain ideas. Passive observers also focus on
providing negative feedback (Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017) as a way
to refine others' ideas by pointing to limitations. All the identified
employee behaviours, except innovators, are highly focused on pro-
viding constructive feedback (Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017) by
adding new inputs to help extend an idea as well as by providing new
perspectives to other employees' contributions to the idea. The latter
form of feedback can be related to the behaviour of reflective
reframing discussed by Hargadon and Bechky (2006), where
employees build on each other's inputs to refine ideas. On the other
hand, innovators focus to a greater extent on providing positive feed-
back (Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017) to others' ideas. The help giving
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
and help seeking behaviours identified by Hargadon and Bechky (2006)
are clearly apparent in the analysis of comments and are to a
larger extent provided by two of the major contributor groups,
legitimizers and socializers. Idea championing (Howell & Boies, 2004;
Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017) is thus also somewhat initiated in the
platform through comments that give and seek help to facilitate the
refinement of others' ideas and through comments that provide
support and legitimacy to them.
Hence, by complementing the network analysis with an interpre-
tative qualitative analysis, we are able to ‘fill networks with meanings’
(Moser et al., 2013). This enables us to provide a more elaborate cate-
gorization of the content of the feedback submitted by employees in
internal crowdsourcing. Our interpretative analysis brought to the sur-
face different forms of feedback (such as help seeking and help giving)
that have received limited attention in the context of crowdsourcing,
both internal and external. By doing so, we extend the work by Ber-
etta (2019) and Chen et al. (2019). These studies have investigated
the content of employee feedback only to a limited extent, showing
that employees differ in the tone of the feedback provided in internal
crowdsourcing, being more or less positive toward others' ideas, as
well as in their knowledge background, which enables them to provide
different types of inputs to ideas. Moreover, our findings differ from
previous studies on external crowdsourcing. For instance, the study
by Füller et al. (2014) shows that participants in external
crowdsourcing especially focused on providing support and encour-
agement to others' ideas through their comments (emotional support),
while providing feedback with informational content to a lower
extent. In contrast, while employees also provide emotional support,
in our study, the majority of the submitted comments relate to cate-
gories such as positive feedback, help giving and constructive feed-
back, which point to the interest of many employees to help refine
others' ideas. Moreover, studies on external crowdsourcing highlight
that external crowds engage in knowledge sharing behaviours espe-
cially when they received clear instructions and incentives to help
stimulate such behaviours (Malhotra & Majchrzak, 2014). This was
not the case in the context of the internal crowdsourcing platform
studied (we elaborate more on this in the sections below).
6.1.2 | Idea elaboration
Building on this, we complement crowdsourcing studies by showing
that employees, through their supporting behaviours, tend to
especially focus on refining ideas with a lower degree of elaboration.
Studies on both internal and external crowdsourcing have looked
at the effect of idea elaboration on the selection of ideas by
experts, showing that ideas with a lower degree of elaboration tend
to be disregarded in these platforms (Beretta, 2019: Piezunka &
Dahlander, 2015). This is mainly due to a lack of understanding of
these ideas by experts, lacking enough details in their description. Our
findings show that employees can play an important role in refining
these underelaborated ideas with additional inputs and feedback that
can further complement them. Relatedly, a key contribution of this
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD
study is to link employees' supporting behaviours to the selection out-
come of the supported ideas. This enables us to provide insights into
which employees' behaviours play an important role during idea elab-
oration, helping supported ideas to become selected by the firm. Pre-
vious studies on external crowdsourcing have examined how the
identified roles in these platforms differ in the quality and outcome of
the ideas they have generated, showing that the most active partici-
pants are also the most innovative ones (Füller et al., 2014; Hutter
et al., 2011; Kathan et al., 2015). To our knowledge, this is the first
study that attempts to link employee participation to others' ideas with
the selection outcome of these ideas, something that crowdsourcing
studies have paid less attention to. Our analysis indicates the key role
played by socializers, passive observers and legitimizers for the selec-
tion of supported ideas, and we provide some explanations for why
this might be the case. Future research should conduct further ana-
lyses to better understand the influence of these different supporting
behaviours on innovative outcomes in these platforms and underlying
mechanisms.
6.1.3 | Underlying motivations
We further extend crowdsourcing and EDI research by providing a
better understanding of employees' motivations to voluntary engage
in supporting behaviours for innovation in these platforms. By doing
so, we address previous calls to investigate the different types of
employees participating in these platforms and their set of motiva-
tions (Wendelken et al., 2014). We shift the attention from
motivations to engage in idea generation activities, which have been
the main focus of previous studies (Axtell et al., 2000; Fairbank &
Williams, 2001; Frese et al., 1999; Wendelken et al., 2014), to motiva-
tions of employees to engage in idea elaboration and championing
activities in internal crowdsourcing. On the one hand, our findings
align with previous studies by showing that extrinsic motivations such
as gaining recognition, career signalling and individual-related benefits
matter for some employees for contributing to internal crowdsourcing
(Fairbank & Williams, 2001; Wendelken et al., 2014). On the other
hand, in contrast to these studies, our findings show a more predomi-
nant role of intrinsic motivations in the form of prosocial behaviours.
We find that especially altruism and organizational citizenship behav-
iours are central for internal crowdsourcing initiatives.
This also indicates an important difference between internal and
external crowdsourcing initiatives. When it comes to external
crowdsourcing, studies show that both extrinsic and intrinsic motiva-
tions play an important role. However, intrinsic motivation is typically
discussed in relation to aspects such as fun, intellectual challenge and
autonomy and less in relation to prosocial behaviours such as altruism
and organizational citizenship (Boudreau & Lakhani, 2009). Other
studies have found that participants' cooperative behaviours in exter-
nal crowdsourcing are driven by curiosity and reciprocity to a greater
extent (Bullinger et al., 2010; Kathan et al., 2015). In contrast, our
study shows that internal crowdsourcing initiatives represent a chan-
nel that enable employees to support the organization's and
555
colleagues' innovation efforts, where implicit norms of helping each
other exist, regardless of being distant colleagues located in different
functions or geographical locations. These prosocial behaviours thus
become a more important driver than other types of motivations. As
such, internal crowdsourcing provides an environment for leveraging
the ‘kindness of strangers’ for innovation purposes and for fostering
employees' intrinsic motivation (Constant et al., 1996).
6.1.4 | Employee-driven innovation
Finally, our study extends and complements studies on EDI
(Hargadon & Bechky, 2006; Høyrup et al., 2012; Perry-Smith &
Mannucci, 2017). These studies have mainly investigated the
supporting behaviours enacted by employees in offline settings, while
such supporting behaviours are seldom investigated in online con-
texts. Our study addresses recent calls for how EDI is enacted through
web-based online tools, with respect to the behaviours performed by
employees to support the innovation process (Bäckström &
Lindberg, 2019; Høyrup et al., 2018). We extend this research by
showing that employees voluntarily enact different supporting activi-
ties for innovation in online crowdsourcing, focusing on the support
and refinement of others' ideas. As such, internal crowdsourcing rep-
resents an alternative channel to leverage the competences of a larger
number of distributed employees for the early phases of the innova-
tion process.
6.2 | Managerial implications
Our findings indicate that organizations implementing internal
crowdsourcing should be aware of the value of engaging not only
innovators but also the marginal participants playing a supportive
function to innovation. The findings from this study can provide
insights into the development of participation architectures for the
voting and refinement of ideas that target different types of
employees as well as regarding employee motivation. Table 5 provides
specific managerial recommendations for each of these dimensions.
We argue that addressing these aspects is crucial for the proper
design and management of these platforms over time and to harvest
the benefits of employee engagement in innovation. Our results indi-
cate that such initiatives can be designed for more than merely moti-
vating innovators, they are also a setting where firms can fertilize
employees' sense of belonging to the organization and their commit-
ment to innovation in general. This is done by providing a space
where ideas are not only shared but also where employees can inter-
act and communicate around these ideas.
6.3 | Limitations and avenues for future research
Our study has a number of limitations that open up opportunities
for further research. First, our study should be complemented by
556 BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD

TABLE 5 Managerial implications

Dimension Managerial implications

Participation architecture • Integrate gamification principles in the platform in the form of badges and virtual points. This is important to
(gamification) consider as some employees may be interested in gaining recognition from the firm and peers.
Participation architecture (idea • Integrate community functionalities to enable new forms of interactions and collaboration in internal
refinement) crowdsourcing, thus allowing employees to engage in supporting behaviours in internal crowdsourcing. This is
also important considering that engagement of employees in supporting behaviours can help move ideas
forward in the process.
• This can be done by introducing a commenting function that enables employees to provide different forms of
feedback (positive, emotional support, constructive, help seeking, help giving and negative feedback) to help
refine others' ideas.
• In the platform studied, the commenting function allowed employees to reply to each other's comments. This is
important to enable them to build on each other's inputs and add new perspectives.
• In the platform studied, the firm made it as easy as possible to submit ideas. This can then enable employees to
participate in further elaborating on ideas that have lower degrees of elaboration.
• Making the platform interactive through a commenting function is also important to link to the needs of some
employees to learn from others and to interact with colleagues from other functions and locations.
Participation architecture • The introduction of a voting system enables employees especially interested in supporting and championing
(voting) others' ideas, such as passive evaluators and legitimizers, to engage in these types of supporting behaviours.
They can then play an important role in signalling to managers which ideas are considered relevant or promising
to evaluate.
Motivation • The establishment of a commenting function can attract employees motivated by altruism, reciprocity,
reputation and organizational citizenship, by giving them the opportunity to help refine others' ideas.
• In the platform studied, the firm made use of tags to better categorize ideas. This can help employees to
participate in refining those ideas that more clearly link to their area of expertise and thus to foster their
intrinsic desire to help colleagues and the organization.
• The definition of strategic categories of ideas can foster the intrinsic desire of employees to help the firm
innovate, providing employees with a sense of purpose and significance. In our case, these areas were linked to
the core values of the organization and thus were seen as meaningful by employees.

longitudinal analyses. This would provide insights into the dynamics
of participation and how to better use these initiatives to support
innovation activities. Interesting questions for future research relate
to how employee behaviours evolve over time, to what extent
employees change behaviours and whether we can observe
changes in the content of the feedback provided by them. It would
also be relevant to conduct additional analyses on the impact of
the different types of employees' behaviours and feedback on the
selection and implementation of ideas. Moreover, our analysis is
based on a single crowdsourcing platform, raising questions about
the generalizability of our findings. Future research should investi-
gate whether the identified employee behaviours can be observed
in other internal crowdsourcing initiatives. Finally, given the
limited number of conducted interviews, future research should
further investigate employees' motivations and whether differences
can be identified in the motivations across employee types.
Despite these limitations, our exploratory study provides a more
comprehensive understanding of employee participation in internal
crowdsourcing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMEN TS
The authors would like to thank Christine Moser and seminar partici-
pants at Aarhus University, CINet Conference and AoM Conference
for the valuable feedback. The authors would also like to thank the
reviewers and editor for their constructive feedback.
OR CID
Michela Beretta https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2139-5879
Helle Alsted Søndergaard https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6461-0946
ENDNOTES
1
After March 2016, as a consequence of different internal changes hap-
pening within the organization, the internal crowdsourcing platform was
transferred to another system (a Yammer platform) and the ownership
of the platform was assigned to other employees. These changes
prevented us from continuing the data collection process.
2
We excluded an extreme outlier from our analysis. This was represented
by a community manager in charge of stimulating conversations in the
platform. This employee displayed a high out-degree centrality for com-
ments provided to ideas, while not engaging in any of the other activi-
ties, resulting in a single-employee cluster. We also discarded the
comments provided by this employee.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Dr. Michela Beretta is assistant professor of innovation manage-
ment at Aarhus University. Her main research and teaching activi-
ties revolve around crowdsourcing, idea management, creativity
and open models of innovation. She published in leading journals
such as the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Creativity
and Innovation Management and Technovation.
Dr. Helle Alsted Søndergaard is associate professor of innovation
management at Aarhus University. Her main research interests lie
within the broad term of open and collaborative innovation,
focusing on the internal organizational aspects of openness and
strategy, and exploring the behaviour of different actors involved
in collaborative innovation processes. She has published in Inter-
national Journal of Technology Management, Technology Manage-
ment Review and Technovation.
How to cite this article: Beretta M, Søndergaard HA.
Employee behaviours beyond innovators in internal
crowdsourcing: What do employees do in internal
crowdsourcing, if not innovating, and why? Creat Innov Manag.
2021;30:542–562. https://doi.org/10.1111/caim.12449
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD 559

APPENDIX A.

F I G U R E A 1 Network configuration of the internal crowdsourcing

platform. Figure A1 reports the full network based on employees'
commenting and voting activities. This figure shows a network
configuration with groups of employees occupying a core position
within the platform and others occupying a more peripheral position.
Employees in the core of the community are highly connected to each
other (thus intensively engaging in providing and receiving comments
and/or votes), while many marginal participants only engage in such
activities to a limited extent [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

FIGURE A2 Coding of the

interviews
560 BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD

TABLE A1 Descriptive statistics

Criteria Mean Median SD Variance Skewness
In-degree centrality comments 1.92 0 7.23 52.27 11.29
In-degree centrality votes 20.2 0 92.4 8540.4 14.8
Out-degree centrality comments 1.673 0 7.396 54.713 13.78
Out-degree centrality votes 3.896 1 9.918 98.376 7.1230
Number of ideas generated 0.660 0 2.41 5.841 13.124
Coparticipation intensity 18.08 0 71.06 5050.4 11.14

Note: Table A1 reports the descriptive statistics of the network measures used for the cluster analysis.
Both Figure A1 and Table A1 indicate that great variation exists in employees' engagement in internal
crowdsourcing, hence hinting to the presence of different employee behaviours. This provides support
for conducting a cluster analysis.

TABLE A2 List of interviewees

ID Job title Role related to crowdsourcing Time (min) Data collection

1 Team coordinator Passive observer 16 Skype interview; recorded
2 Packaging engineer Innovator 30 Skype interview; recorded
3 Senior marketing manager Passive observer 25 Skype interview; recorded
4 Senior development manager Legitimizer 26 Skype interview; recorded
5 Senior portfolio manager Socializer 35 Skype interview; recorded
6 Continuous improvement manager Socializer 43 Skype interview; recorded
7 Job trainer Passive evaluator 23 Skype interview; recorded
8 Portfolio manager Socializer 45 Skype interview; recorded
9 Senior equipment engineer Passive observer 25 Skype interview; recorded
10 Senior manager specialist Legitimizer 15 Skype interview; recorded
11 Quality controller Passive evaluator 22 Skype interview; recorded
12 Lean consultant Passive evaluator 32 Skype interview; recorded
13 Logistic engineer Innovator 27 Skype interview; recorded
14 Global master trainer Legitimizer 30 Skype interview; recorded
BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD 561

TABLE A3 Example of an idea and subsequent discussions

Submitted idea

Small containers with lid instead of bags in the xxx

Subsequent comments Content of the feedback Employee role

‘What if it was tested within a theme, Constructive feedback Passive evaluator
kind of like the “digital xxx” idea within
xxx? Maybe have the ideas xxx or xxx
or xxx, or a theme where people are
already expecting a more premium
experience, and might appreciate the
little extras’.
‘Maybe good compromise would be to Constructive feedback Passive observer
much improve the offer of various
storage xxx/sort boxes—it is more
efficient because only those interested
will buy them. Now I can say the offer
online which I can see is really poor—I
have found only one retired sorting
box: http://xxx. So if we can supply
more xxx storage boxes I think many
people will be happy—generally it is
great idea to provide them some
solution for improving “xxx order”:)’.
‘This sounds a bit similar to what larger Constructive feedback Passive evaluator
xxx had in the mid-90s. They were
showcase style boxes with
compartments for the different parts,
see image. It's from xxx in 1994’.
‘I do like the idea, however, using plastic Negative feedback Legitimizer
boxes instead of bags would result in a
larger consumption of plastic for the
packaging as one container inevitably
requires more material than one bag. I
do not know how many consumers
really keep the packaging, but I think
far from all do. That way I would fear
that we create more scrap with such a
solution. Or?’
‘I must admit it does not make sense to Negative feedback Passive evaluator
me, even if it is for bigger xxx only. The
consumer will simply end up with a lot
of unwanted containers. Also, I should
think the amount of plastic used in
creating containers would be many
times more than the one used for
plastic bags. So, eventually, the amount
of plastic going in the environment
would increase dramatically’.
‘Wouldn't this radically increase the cost Negative feedback Passive observer
on all fronts? The packing machinery
would need to be completely
reprogrammed and reassembled. The
weight of the boxes would be
increased, thus increasing the cost of
shipping (and consumption of fuel to
do so). I think it goes without saying
that the boxes themselves would cost
more than little plastic baggies. And if a
box ever was damaged in transit, of
course they'd need to be replaced too
if we wanted to sell the box damaged’.

(Continues)
562 BERETTA AND SØNDERGAARD

TABLE A3 (Continued)

Submitted idea

Small containers with lid instead of bags in the xxx

Subsequent comments Content of the feedback Employee role

‘Seems like it could make the boxes more Positive feedback Passive evaluator
robust, as well. Less prone to being
crushed in shipping’.
‘I can only see pros from this idea. It Positive feedback Passive observer
would take part of the noise away from
xxx when you do not have to open up a
crackling bag all the time. Also when I
xxx with bags I open the bag and try
and sort the xxx out on the table.
Having your own box with the xxx
already sorted in, makes building so
much easier, and a lot less messy’.