Research On Knowledge-sharing Continuance Behavior In Virtual Community

During knowledge era,Competition between organizations will gradually shift from physical capital based on land,labor and money to intellectual capital as the core competitive,Knowledge has become the organization to obtain the most critical elements of the core competitive advantages. Thus knowledge management has been blooming in the both fields of theory and practice. During the process of knowledge management,knowledge sharing is the most important element.Only through sharing can the knowledge at the individual level be achieved their economic value and competitive value. On the other hand, As the internet stepped into the community era, the virtual community has become an important place for the exchange of information and communication. In the past few years it has been considered an important platform to improve the level of knowledge sharing,because virtual community has the characteristics of fairness, openness, across time and space,and can also integrate distributed knowledge base on a larger scale even worldwide. However,the existing of the virtual communities can not be a promise for knowledge sharing. There are still some problems including users’lack of participation and low willingness of knowledge sharing. Deep exploration of the knowledge sharing bahavior law in virtual communities has theoretical significance.In fact,reasearch on the influencing factors of knowledge sharing has become the focus of attention in domestic and foreign scholars. Existing studies have shown that many scholars have focused on the influencing factors of the virtual community knowledge-sharing behavior from the view of psychology, sociology, behavioral science, but close examination reveal that the existing studies neglect the impact of the change of the mental processes of the community members on knowledge sharing behavior,thus few studies concerned about topics on knowledge-sharing continuance behavior of community member in virtual community.Based on these, this study selected knowledge-sharing continuance behavior in virtual community as the theme of the paper, analyzed and validate the influencing factors and mechanism of action on knowledge-sharing continuance behavior in virtual community.In order to provide theoretical guidance for raising the level of knowledge management in virtual community, this research first intent to review and summarize the existing research,then further deepen and expand the current research, make a further exploration of the internal mechanism of the virtual community knowledge-sharing behavior. The research mainly included as following aspects:(1) Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior(TPB), Expectation-Confirmation Theory(ECT), Perceived Value Theory(PVT),Social Capital Theory(SCT),and Social Cognitive Theory(SCT),this dissertation constructed a modle of factors influcing knowledge-sharing continuance intentions in virtual community to test. The model covered several core factors such as confirmation,satisfaction,perceived value,knowledge self-efficacy and so on.(2) Some of the members of the community were selected for in-depth interviews,then the contents for the interview were analysed by using content analysis method.According to the results of the analysis,the paper dealt with anatomy of the composition of the perceived value dimension and argued that the perceived value consists of the practical value, social value, emotional value and altruism value.(3)The dissertation did exploratory factor analysis for77pre-testing questionnaires,the purpose of which was to filter the item of scale and form the final questionnaires according to analysis of reliability and validity.Based on the data of292final questionnaires collected from investigation and internet,this dissertation also did reasearch on sample characteristic,and did confirmatory analysis to estimate reliability and validity of measurement,then tested the model by structural equation modeling(SEM).(4) The results of research indicated that influencing factors have a direct effect on knowledge-sharing continuance intentions including perceived value, satisfaction, trust, community norms and knowledge self-efficacy; Emotional value, social value and altruistic value has a positive impact on the perceived value; Confirmation has a positive impact on perceived value and satisfaction.The main contribution of this dissertation are:(1) Draw on related research in the field of behavioral research about Expectations-Confirmation Theory and Perceived Value Theory, which were transplanted to explore knowledge-sharing continuance behavior in virtual community. The impact of some key variables on knowledge-sharing continuance behavior was analyzed.(2) A theoretical model of continous knowledge sharing in virtual community was constructed based on Theory of Planned Behavior, integrating Expectations-Confirmation Theory, Social Capital Theory, Social Cognitive Theory, and Perceived Value Theory.(3) The dissertation dealt with anatomy of the composition of the perceived value dimensionthrough qualitative research methods, divided perceived value into practical value, emotional value, social value and altruistic value.(4) Different conclusions were brought out in this dissertation while the author tested the constructed model under the ground of empirical study.lt was found that practical value does not significantly affect perceived value, social interaction ties on knowledge-sharing continuance intentions has no significant effect, the knowledge-sharing continuance intentions on knowledge-sharing continuance behavior has no significant effect.