Study Of Knowledge Exchange And Sharing Behavior In Virtual Communities

As a result of the development of computer science and network technology, the concept of Virtual Community has gone into people's viewpoint and brought huge impacts and challenges to people's lives and work. In fact, Virtual Community is a concept relative to real community; Virtual Community gathers people of the same object or interest together by the internet, and in this virtual space people can communicate freely, help each other, even do business and so on.The rapid development of Virtual Community arises the attention of the theory and practice field. As a space and platform to aggregate people, how to stimulate members' contact and communication in the Virtual Community is very important to the operator.The study focused on the relationship of Virtual Community members' character and their knowledge exchange in the community. We adopted the Achievement Needs Theory to discuss what impacts the knowledge acquisition and contribution of the member, and the differences between them, then, we gave some suggestions to the management practice.316 people participated in the interview and questionnaire survey and the hypotheses were largely supported. The main results were showed as follows:1. There were positive relationships among the members' inherent needs, self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation and their knowledge exchange in the Virtual Community, and we can motivate their participation through the three aspects;2. The reinforces of the Virtual Community, including financial reinforces, performance appraisal and social recognition, had impact on the intrinsic motivation of the member, then the knowledge exchange;3. There were differences between the factor affecting the knowledge acquisition and knowledge contribution of the Virtual Community members.