Virtual teams play a crucial role in today’s knowledge-based organisation for overcoming challenges in our dynamic world, especially in the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teams play a key role in today’s knowledge-based organization for overcoming challenges in our dynamic world. Drawing on social information processing theory, this study explores the effect of members’ humility and team environment within a leaderless team mainly based on virtual platforms. Their impacts on shared leadership, relationship conflict and team and individual performance were investigated. Surveying 219 students forming 61 virtual leaderless teams, our findings showed that a high level of humility and a positive team environment can help to improve shared leadership within a team, which contributes to team performance. Moreover, both humility and team environment have a negative relationship with relationship conflict, which depressed both team and individual performance. Our analysis also indicated that humility positively interacts with team environment on shared leadership.

The micro-task crowdsourcing marketplace, as a novel platform, has provided firms with a new way to recruit employees at a reasonable cost and with a fast turnaround. This research explores how different types of motivations affect individuals’ continued participation intention in compensation-based micro-task crowdsourcing platforms. Our theoretical model builds on expectancy theory, self-determination theory, organizational justice theory and self-efficacy theory. To validate the theoretical model, over 1,000 crowd workers participating in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk completed an online questionnaire. Distributive justice and self-efficacy were applied to moderate the relationship between different types of motivations and continued participation intention. The confirmed three-way interaction effects indicated that external regulation and intrinsic motivation on continued participation intention are contingent on distributive justice and the level of self-efficacy. The findings enrich the understanding of MCS communities and provide important guidelines for motivating crowd workers.