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Crowdsourcing platforms have emerged as an innovative way to generate ideas and solving problems. However, promoting sustained participation among crowdworkers is an ongoing challenge for most crowdsourcing platform providers. Drawing on self-determination theory, this study investigates the impacts of job autonomy on crowdworkers' sustained participation intention.

A survey of 212 crowdworkers from a leading crowdsourcing platform in China was conducted to empirically validate the model.

The empirical results lead to several key findings. First, the taxonomy of job autonomy in crowdsourcing contains three archetypes: work-scheduling autonomy, work-task autonomy, and work-method autonomy. Second, work-scheduling autonomy and work-method autonomy have more significant positive effects on temporal value than work-task autonomy, and this increase in temporal value increases crowdworkers' sustained participation intention. Third, work-task autonomy exerts a stronger influence on hedonic value than work-scheduling autonomy or work-method autonomy, and this increase in hedonic value also increases crowdworkers' sustained participation intention.

This study extends the crowdsourcing literature by examining the formation of crowdworkers' sustained participation and highlighting the role of differential effects of multidimensional job autonomy on crowdworkers' sustained participation. We believe that this study provides actionable insights into measures that promote crowdworkers' sustained participation in the crowdsourcing platform.

The ever‐changing global environment that is more and more quality driven demands a new vision of the role of corporate culture in the implementation of total quality in a manufacturing company. This study of three manufacturing companies in Slovenia shows that only an open and human oriented corporate culture that is based on the autonomy of the workplace and human resource management can be successful in implementing the total quality management (TQM) in all working processes in the company. Employees are empowered and intrinsically motivated for quality work when they have internal justification for taking actions that are supported by corporate culture. They definitely play an active role in the TQM environment.

As knowledge management increasingly becomes critical for the success of professional service firms, this paper uses social exchange theory to investigate the interactive impact of transformational leadership and organizational innovation on online knowledge sharing by employees in professional service firms. This study aims to investigate the mediating roles of job autonomy and job engagement in this process.

Data were collected from a survey of 350 frontline employees in professional service providers, including banking, telecommunication and insurance. Structural equation modeling was used for data analysis.

The results show that transformational leadership positively affects job autonomy, which in turn has a positive impact on online knowledge sharing through job engagement. Thus, job autonomy and job engagement mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and online knowledge sharing. Finally, organizational innovation moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and job autonomy.

This paper extends the knowledge management literature by studying the impact of transformational leadership on the online knowledge-sharing behavior and exploring the focal roles of job autonomy and job engagement in online-sharing behavior in professional service firms. The findings also provide useful implications for practitioners to help them engage employees in the adoption of digital technologies to optimize outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the level and predictors of work engagement among service sector employees in eight European countries.

The work seeks to discover if job demands and resources, i.e. job autonomy and social support, affect work engagement in differing ways in different countries when socio‐demographical variables and work‐related factors are controlled. The study is based on a statistical analysis of survey data from Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the UK in 2007 (n=7,867). The data represent four economic sectors: retail trade, finance and banking, telecoms and public hospitals.

The results show that the level of work engagement varies not only between countries but also between those four economic sectors within each country. Additionally, the findings indicate that demands decrease work engagement, while autonomy and support increase it. Although the effects are mainly the same across the countries, the article also points out some exceptions in this regard.

Although the paper is built upon established theories about job demands and autonomy, it uses a newer work engagement approach, produces cross‐national knowledge about work engagement and its predictors. Cross‐national approaches to work engagement are still rare.

The purpose of this paper is to ask: what are the temporal realities of female knowledge workers? It especially focusses on women’s possibilities of using working-time autonomy, and the work and non-work practices that shape their possibility to use work-hour autonomy. In knowledge work, working-time autonomy is usually high, but exercising autonomy is not always possible. The study was carried out in Finland, where full-time work is common also among women, even if they have small children.

The data include 19 semi-structured interviews of women who have knowledge-intensive work. The method of analysis is problem-driven content analysis.

Female knowledge workers intertwine several temporal realities. The utilisation of working-time autonomy is restricted by unpredictability, continuous interruptions, hurriedness and ineffective work practices. The temporal realities of family life, such as taking children to the daycare or school, other everyday routines and a spouse’s working-time autonomy have an effect on women’s possibilities to use working-time autonomy. The line between work and non-work blurs.

This study sheds light on working-time autonomy among female knowledge workers. It adds an understanding to the temporal realities of work and outside work that influence the use of work-hour autonomy. This information is needed to understand time demands arising from work, which play a role in work-family research in particular.

In this chapter we argue that self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000) provides a useful conceptual tool for organizational researchers, one that complements traditional work motivation theories. First, we review SDT, showing that it has gone far beyond the “intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation” dichotomy with which it began. Then we show how the theory might be applied to better understand a variety of organizational phenomena, including the positive effects of transformational leadership, the nature of “true” goal-commitment, the determinants of employees’ training motivation, and the positive impact of certain human resource practices. We note that SDT may yield significant new understanding of work motivation, and suggest opportunities to refine the theory for research on work-related phenomena.

This paper explores the theoretical implications of empowered self‐management as a teamwork design concept. It explores the multiple definitions of empowerment and self‐management that have been used in the design of work teams and it attempts to locate empowered self‐management within the relevant traditions of work design. The paper provides a critical appraisal of empowered self‐management as a team design concept arguing that its unique contribution to the work design literature, has been the development of concepts that focus upon task enlargement as the basis of enhanced role accountabilities within teams. Empowered self‐management as a team design concept has little to say about employee or group autonomy but in fact reflects the design of teams to provide for the normative self‐regulation of employees within management directed systems of control.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how healthcare first-line managers think about and act regarding workplace survey processes.

This interview study was performed at a hospital in south Sweden. First-line healthcare managers (n=24) volunteered. The analysis was inspired by phenomenography, which aims to describe the ways in which different people experience a phenomenon. The phenomenon was a workplace health promotion (WHP) survey processes.

Four main WHP survey process approaches were identified among the managers: as a possibility, as a competition, as a work task among others and as an imposition. For each, three common subcategories emerged; how managers: stated challenges and support from hospital management; described their own work group and collaboration with other managers; and expressed themselves and their situation in their roles as first-line managers.

Insights into how hospital management can understand their first-line managers’ motivation for survey processes and practical suggestions and how managers can work proactively at organizational, group and individual level are presented.

Usually these studies focus on those who should respond to a survey; not those who should run the survey process. Focusing on managers and not co-workers can lead to more committed and empowered managers and thereby success in survey processes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore job design mechanisms that enhance team proactivity within a lean production system where autonomy is uttermost restricted. We propose and test a model where the team learning process of building shared meaning of work mediates the relationship between team participative decision-making, inter team relations and team proactive behaviour.

The results are based on questionnaires to 417 employees within manufacturing industry (response rate 86 per cent) and managers’ ratings of team proactivity. The research model was tested by mediation analysis on aggregated data (56 teams).

Team learning mediates the relationship between participative decision-making and inter team collaboration on team proactive behaviour. Input from stakeholders in the work flow and partaking in decisions about work, rather than autonomy in carrying out the work, enhance the teams’ proactivity through learning processes.

An investigation of the effects of different leadership styles and management policy on proactivity through team-learning processes might shed light on how leadership promotes proactivity, as results support the effects of team participative decision-making – reflecting management policy – on proactivity.

Lean production stresses continuous improvements for enhancing efficiency, and such processes rely on individuals and teams that are proactive. Participation in forming the standardization of work is linked to managerial style, which can be changed and developed also within a lean concept. Based on our experiences of implementing the results in the production plant, we discuss what it takes to create and manage participative processes and close collaboration between teams on the shop floor, and other stakeholders such as production support, based on a shared understanding of the work and work processes.

Learning at the workplace is essential for long-term employability, and for job satisfaction and health. The lean concept is widely spread to both public bodies and enterprises, and it has been shown that it can be linked to increased stress and an increase in workload. Finding the potential for learning within lean production is essential for balancing the need of efficient production and employees’ health and well-being at work.

Very few studies have investigated the paradox between lean and teamwork, yet many lean-inspired productions systems have teamwork as a pillar for enhancing effectiveness. A clear distinction between autonomy and participation contributes to the understanding of the links between job design, learning processes and team proactivity.