Research On The Factors Influencing Knowledge Sharing In Virtual Communities For Individuals

In the context of knowledge-driven economy, the knowledge has becoming thecrucial resources for the enterprise being invincible in the marketing competition.Boisot&Griffiths(1999) has pointed out that it is much more important to encourage thestaffs to share their knowledge and experience voluntarily than to acquire, save andspread the knowledge. Above all,the major task and question of knowledge managementis how to organize the staffs and encourage them to share their knowledge andexperience voluntarily. With the highly development of technology and popularity of theelectronics application, the virtual community has been gradually becoming theplatform and carrier for the cyber citizen to comment, spread news, communicate. Theadvancing platform can produce the cyber citizen knowledge and news which is also theimportant source for them to spread. The cyber community can gain the news andinformation of high quality in succession through the virtual community which promotethe efficiency of the knowledge and information use and innovation. The individuals, asthe principal part in the knowledge sharing community, are the content makers andatmosphere catalyst, the managers in the community has the responsibility to find outwhat the factors affecting the willingness of sharing the knowledge and information are,in order that the managers can improve the community modes and raise relatedincentive measures which can promote the quantity and quality of the informationsharing in the community. According to the lack of the motivation, the staffs usuallyrefuse to share the information and knowledge in the organization with others. In thisregard, the oversea researcher has started the research on the theory and practice, andfinally got some outcomes. But until now, in this fields, the domestic researchers arestaying in the preliminary stage who focus more on the theory study than the practicestudy.After a summary, the TPB (Theory of Planned Behavior) is the basis in this paper.This paper mainly focuses on the factors affecting the individuals who works in the ITenterprises sharing the tacit knowledge, proposing the theoretical models andassumption that the individuals share the tacit knowledge and information in the virtual community. The independent variables are emotional attitudes, instrumental attitudes,mandatory scope, descriptive norms, self-control, self-efficacy of information sharing,self-efficacy of specific websites. The dependent variables are the degrees that theindividuals participating the information sharing. At present, very few researchers startthe research on the tacit knowledge sharing in the virtual community. This paper hasexpanded the revision of TPB scope on the theoretical application which makes up theshortcomings of the research on the quantitative analysis on the tacit knowledge sharingin the virtual community.The tacit knowledge is the core ability of the enterprise as the knowledge sharinghas lot to do with the factors of human being, so the research on the factors affecting theindividuals sharing the tacit knowledge has the great significance. Hopefully, this papercan indicate more suggestion on the individuals in the enterprise sharing the knowledgeand information.