Gig-workers’ motivations and their entrepreneurial mindset

Abstract

The labor market has been undergoing several changes, partially because of technological advancements. More and more people are switching from long-term job contract to short-term ones. These agreements are concluded through online platforms, leading to the expansion of the phenomenon called gig-economy. These flexible and goal-oriented jobs are questioning the “classic” employee role. Indeed, gig-workers experience issues as autonomy, financial instability, and condition of uncertainty, that previously characterized only the entrepreneurial career. The academic literature still tries to understand how these individuals should be considered, as some researchers are starting to refer to them as “microentrepreneurs”. This paper tries to add knowledge to this topic by analyzing their motivational traits in order to understand which academic opinion should be followed. The motivations that lead people to engage gig-working activities and their entrepreneurial psychological traits have been analyzed by this research in order to understand whether they own an entrepreneurial mindset or not. Taking a worker-centric approach, the results lead to the development of 4 different gig-worker profiles. Each category describes gig-workers’ motivations. Simultaneously, it verifies the entrepreneurial drivers identified by the literature about entrepreneur’s motivations. Findings shows that gig-workers perceive most of the entrepreneur’s drivers, however, their entrepreneurial mindset varies depending on which gig-working platform they engage. In fact, people that utilize Airbnb are more entrepreneurial than Temper users.