Getting Gig Workers to Do More by Doing Good: Field Experimental Evidence From Online Platform Labor Marketplaces

• Published in: Organization & environment Vol. 34; no. 3; pp. 387 - 412
• Main Author: Burbano, Vanessa C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.09.2021; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Charities; Donations; Employees; Employers; Field tests; Gig economy; Heterogeneity; Human capital; Information dissemination; Internet; Labor; Labor market; Motivation; Perceptions; Philanthropy; Responsiveness; Social responsibility; Workers; strategy implementation; CSR; business strategy and the environment; environmental communication; quantitative methods; field experiments; corporate social responsibility; greening business functions
• ISSN: 1086-0266; 1552-7417
• DOI: 10.1177/1086026619846455

This article describes randomized field experiments implemented on two online labor market platforms examining the effect of employer charitable giving on a source of human capital that is becoming increasingly important to firms: the “gig” worker. It provides support that a message about charitable giving increases gig workers’ willingness to complete extra work, and that prosocially oriented gig workers are most responsive. A process experiment reveals that sharing information about charitable giving increases how close workers feel to their gig employer, and that the effect is greater if workers previously felt distant from (as opposed to already felt close to) their employer. This article provides insight into gig workers’ nonpecuniary motivation, explores heterogeneity in this type of workers’ responsiveness to charitable giving and illustrates how online platform labor markets can be used as a setting to implement field experiments examining effects of employer-level characteristics on gig worker behavior.