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Online knowledge-sharing communities (OKSCs) are online social networks that facilitate social interactions and promote knowledge sharing (Chiu, Hsu, & Wang, 2006). Despite the considerable body of registrants in OKSCs, the number of longtime participants is limited. The existence of OKSCs depends on initial participation, but their success relies heavily on participants’ longtime participation (Hwang, Singh, & Argote, 2015). This study focuses on OKSCs that enable open and voluntary participation. In OKSCs, individuals are free to participate in the community and they also have the freedom to leave the community without worrying about being punished. In this sense, many participants are one-time or short-term users (Sun, Fang, & Lim, 2012). The social networks cannot be well-developed and social interactions cannot be fostered among them, which impedes the development of longtime participation. Additionally, compared with knowledge-sharing communities that are regulated by organizations, the issue of longtime participation is more notable in the OKSC type investigated in this study. To this end, this study aims to develop an understanding of the antecedents of the longtime OKSC participation by examining why people become involved and continuously commit to OKSCs.
Knowledge management in China has gained great importance due to an emphasis on the global economy (Ou, Davison, & Wong, 2016). Since Chinese have an appreciation of face maintenance, they tend to prefer informal and implicit communication styles (Li, Ardichvili, Maurer, Wentling, & Stuedemann, 2007). Therefore, OKSCs are warmly embraced by Chinese people for informal communication. Despite the popularity of OKSCs, the reasons why people maintain longtime participation in OKSCs in China are not well understood. Since OKSCs entail open and voluntary participation, participative behavior is inherently a function of individual characteristics (Huang, Davison, Liu, & Gu, 2008). As such, it is necessary to examine how participants’ motivations influence their longtime OKSC participation in the Chinese context.
OKSCs inherit the social features of real communities (Yu, Jiang, & Chan, 2011). China has been categorized as a collectivistic culture where people attach great importance to personal relationships (Huang et al., 2008). As a consequence, it is necessary to develop an understanding of how contextual factors influence OKSC participative behavior. Interpersonal trust and the norm of reciprocity have been identified as important elements in China with respect to knowledge sharing (Ou et al., 2016). However, prior studies have mainly focused on examining their direct effects on knowledge sharing (Chen & Hung, 2010; Huang et al., 2008). Since personal motivations to stay in OKSCs can be influenced by contextual factors, this study investigates how interpersonal trust and the norm of reciprocity moderate the relationship between personal motivations and OKSC longtime participation.