A Study of Factors Affecting Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Communities

• Main Authors: Kuo-Li Lin, 林國立
• Other Authors: Jeng-Chung Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/52447134457974333386

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 電信管理研究所 === 95 === Digital technology has provided a new paradigm in every corner of our society and resulted in our lives being changed through interaction over the Internet. The Internet has provided people with a new medium for social activities, thereby opening up entirely new features of social reality. Many individuals participate in virtual communities, especially in professional virtual communities (i.e., virtual communities of practice: CoPs), for seeking knowledge to resolve problems at work Driven by a knowledge economy, many organizations have recognized knowledge as a valuable intangible resource that holds the key to competitive advantages (Grant, 1996) and begun to support the development and growth of virtual communities to meet their business needs and objectives. In this study, it had examined that whether the factors in transaction uncertainty will affect the virtual community members’ perceived cost and expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation affect the numbers’ knowledge sharing behavior in virtual community. And it also research whether the explicit and tacit knowledge will affect the numbers’ knowledge sharing in virtual community. The study will design an experiment to collect the data via controlling three factors, which will be analyzed by analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multiple regressions. The major findings of this study are as following: (1) Almost all transaction uncertainties have significant effect on perceived cost except behavioral uncertainty. (2) The frequency of transaction has no significant moderating effect on the relationship between transaction uncertainty and perceived cost except the relation between environment uncertainty and perceived cost. (3) Almost all subject task values have significant effect on knowledge sharing, except intrinsic value. (4) Explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge have different effect in this research framework, and also have some common point.