| Communities of Practice (COP) groups have been found to experience member retention problems when the groups either have to process too much or too little information. Another possible retention problem may relate to the quality of the knowledge being collected. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine the relationship between the perceived quality of knowledge artifacts, and the impact of artifact quality upon the capacity of COP groups to sustain themselves. Whether or not members of COP groups agree with current research that the attributes of knowledge artifact quality consist of content, usability, and relevance was also investigated. The data was gathered utilizing a survey, validity tested using Cronbach's alpha, and hypotheses tested using Pearson's correlation coefficient to analyze the survey data. The participants were adult persons aged 18 through 65 years, who originated from three COPs involved with business analysis, project management, and technical communication practices. Using a convenience methodology for sampling, participants were separated in a stratified manner based upon age ranges, with the numbers of males and females balanced as much as possible. The results using Pearson's correlation coefficient indicated that there is no relationship between knowledge artifact quality and COP membership retention (r=.206, p<0.05) or usability of knowledge (r=.159, p<0.05). However, using Pearson's correlation coefficient, there was a relationship between knowledge artifact quality and the attributes of relevance (r=.018, p<0.05) and content (r=.037, p<0.05). The conclusions from the data indicate that knowledge artifact quality has no impact on the retention of COP members and that the quality factors of relevance and content are considered as knowledge artifact quality perception traits by COP members. The recommendation for maintaining viable COP group membership is to ensure full organizational management support when COP's are formed and continually operated, along with information volume monitoring to prevent low motivation from information scarcity or overload. Recommendations for further research are to pursue an in-depth mixed methods type of study using a larger sample size to further determine what other quality traits may be considered by COP members when conducting knowledge artifact assessments and to confirm the findings of this study. |
