Hybridsourcing: A novel work allocation mechanism to provide controlled autonomy to workers

Abstract

Workforce management is a growing concern in people intensive service organizations like IT service delivery. The knowledge workers tend to get de-motivated due to the mundane nature of maintenance tasks assigned to them. To tackle this problem, many organizations are willing to experiment with novel methods of work allocation that provide certain amount of autonomy to the knowledge workers by enabling them to choose what they want to work on. In this paper, we propose a method of work allocation that provides opportunities to employees to choose their work without the organization having to compromise on the regular business tasks. The idea is to use crowdsourcing concepts for the tasks that will enable employees to showcase their skills and talent. We have modeled crowdsourced cum managerial assignments, which we call Hybridsourcing, as an auction mechanism and use game theoretic analysis for studying the competition among players and the tradeoffs for the organization. As part of the auction mechanism for carrying out Hybridsourcing, two games have been formulated based on: 1) players have common knowledge about the operation costs and 2) operation costs are a private information. We show the existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium (NE) in both the cases and provide an algorithm bounded by polynomial complexity in order to compute the NE. The outcome of the mechanism is defined by the unique NE. Furthermore, we study the pros and cons of our mechanism vis-a-vis the popular auction based mechanisms like VCG and few others. We also show that the mechanism allows for flexible autonomy making it very practical. © 2014 IEEE.