Accountability is a requisite for social order; without it, chaos would ensue. Within all organizations, accountability keeps employees on the straight and narrow by ensuring that they follow orders and act in line with the interests of the collective. In traditional organizations, accountability is administered by bosses and coworkers. By contrast, labor platforms (e.g., Uber, Upwork, Fiverr, MTurk) have no bosses or coworkers, and instead rely on customers and technological innovations to hold workers accountable. While differences in accountability systems between traditional organizations and labor platforms have been discussed, what has been left unexamined are differences in workers' felt accountability that result from these different accountability systems. This distinction is important, as it is ultimately a worker's felt accountability which guides their actions. As such, this dissertation seeks to fill the void in the extant research by examining how organization type (traditional vs. labor platform) influences the accountability experienced by workers.First, a targeted review of the relevant accountability research over the past 40 years is performed, with an eye on the relationship between accountability systems and felt accountability. Next, an overview of relevant labor platforms literature is provided. The overview starts with a description of labor platforms and moves to a description of the lived work realities of platform workers. Then, features of the accountability environment are used to generate relevant hypotheses. Next, the dissertation's methods including samples and measures used are discussed, and results of the study are described. It was theorized that differences between the accountability systems of labor platforms and traditional organizations would result in theoretically equivalent differences in workers' felt accountability. Features of the accountability environment were measured phenomenologically to test these hypotheses. Specifically, it was predicted that platform workers would have less accountability intensity, more outcome accountability, less process accountability, and less accountability salience than traditional workers. However, largely contrary to these expectations, a pattern emerged of platform workers having more felt accountability in most instances, especially when controlling for task characteristics (skill variety and reciprocal interdependence). Finally, future research directions are discussed.
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