An Empirical Research On Factors Influencing Knowledge-sharing In Virtual Communities

Nowadays in China, with the rapid development of network, virtual community becomes a main application, and virtual community of e-commerce suffers a wide range of concerns. In order to maintain and develop the communities, it is important for virtual community providers to raise the level of knowledge sharing and enhance customer loyalty in virtual communities, as virtual community provides an important platform for e-commerce. To excavate and determine the factors that influence knowledge-sharing in virtual communities becomes a valuable topic.The first part of this paper is review and analysis of studies on virtual community, knowledge-sharing and virtual social relationships. Then, based on Social Capital Theory, we built a research model including a few factors that theoretically affect knowledge-sharing in virtual communities, such as trust on community, virtual relationships, virtual association, community norms, community atmosphere etc. We finish the scales by referring to previous studies, self-designing virtual relationships and virtual association part, and dividing knowledge-sharing into two dimensions, as there was no consensus on measurement of knowledge-sharing.In the main part, 306 valid questionnaires were statistically analyzed, including validity, reliability, factor analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis. A few conclusions are drawn as following: trust on community promotes knowledge-sharing, economy-based trust affecting knowledge-sharing activeness, while identification-based trust acting directly on initiative. Virtual relationships and community norms have no significant impact on knowledge-sharing initiative, but they all significantly influence knowledge-sharing activeness. Virtual association and community atmosphere have prominently positive effect on both initiative and activeness.This paper uses Social Capital Theory as its theoretical foundation, focusing on the roles of virtual relationships and virtual association in knowledge-sharing. We complete empirical research by disseminating questionnaires to virtual community members, and analyzing quantitative data to support relevant theories.