Engaging customer care employees in internal collaborative crowdsourcing: Managing the inherent tensions and associated challenges

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21952
• Author: Steve Myers,Ann Majchrzak,Arvind Malhotra,William Bonfield
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Date: 01 March 2020

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Engaging customer care employees in internal collaborative

crowdsourcing: Managing the inherent tensions and associated

challenges

Arvind Malhotra

1

| Ann Majchrzak

2

| William Bonfield

3

| Steve Myers

3

1

Kenan-Flagler Business School, The

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

2

Marshall School of Business, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, California

3

Optum Inc., 11000 Optum Circle, Eden

Prairie, MN 55344

Correspondence

Arvind Malhotra, Kenan-Flagler Business

School, The University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27516.

Email: malhotra@unc.edu

Customer care employees (CCEs) are an excellent source of ideas for new and enhanced ser-

vices for customers. By serving many customers, CCEs have the ability to see patterns in

unserved and underserved needs. By being inside rather than external to the firm, CCEs have

the ability to offer suggestions that build on existing capabilities, which result in ideas that are

more easily implementable. There is a long history of research and practice for soliciting sugges-

tions from employees, but little of this work has described how CCEs can be organized into a

temporary online crowd to cocreate innovative ideas. With the advent of crowdsourcing soft-

ware platforms, online collaboration among geographically distributed CCEs is increasingly pos-

sible. We describe an action research study of Optum, a healthcare company that implemented

a collaborative internal crowdsourcing initiative over a period of 18 months. The action research

study led to the identification of three tensions and associated challenges. We outline eight

HRM actions that were undertaken to mitigate the challenges of engaging CCEs in internal

crowdsourcing efforts. Based on our findings, we lay out a general framework, implications, and

future research directions for research and managerial actions when engaging CCEs in internal

collaborative crowdsourcing.

KEYWORDS

action research, crowdsourcing, customer care employees, innovation, knowledge creation

1|INTRODUCTION

Strategic human resource management (HRM) practices are linked to

the innovation performance of firms (Chen & Huang, 2009). Customer

care employees (CCEs) can be a great source of innovative ideas for

developing and delivering new services for customers. HRM practices

designed to leverage CCEs' deep knowledge of the customers' explicit

and tacit needs lead to greater customer satisfaction and organiza-

tional performance (Bowen, 1986; Schneider & Bowen, 1993). HRM

practices that integrate employees into the process of determining

and addressing the strategic needs of an organization are key to

adapting to change (Schuler, 1992). The design of strategic human

resource systems that allow for participation of employees in “the

front end of business planning is essential to meeting the long-run

needs of the enterprise”(Miles & Snow, 1984, p. 26). Strategic human

resource systems designed to foster and enhance participation of

employees in innovation decisions support extra roles that go beyond

day-to-day customer engagement (Kesting & Parm Ulhøi, 2010). Such

extra roles engaging employees in innovation are key for organiza-

tional renewal and competitiveness (Kessel, Hannemann-Weber, &

Kratzer, 2012). Innovative ideas are more likely when the employees

cocreate, that is, build on each other's ideas and knowledge (Collins &

Smith, 2006; Lee, Olson, & Trimi, 2012; Ordanini, Parasuraman, &

Rubera, 2014). To engage employees in such a manner, organizations

are increasingly using software platforms to internally crowdsource

innovative ideas (Erickson, Trauth, & Petrick, 2012; Malhotra, Majchr-

zak, Kesebi, & Looram, 2017; Simula & Vuori, 2012).

Internal collaborative crowdsourcing used in large geographically

dispersed organizations entails broadcasting an open call for cocreat-

ing innovative solutions for new customer services and products

(Malhotra, Majchrzak, Kesebi, & Looram, 2017). Senior management

makes the call for innovation to employees representing different

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21952

Hum Resour Manage. 2020;59:121–134. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrm © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 121