The Influence Of External Motivation On Internal Motivation In Knowledge Sharing Community

With the development of the Internet,user-generated content(UGC)has become one of the main forms of content generation on the network.Knowledge sharing community is a typical form of UGC platform.People raise questions,answer questions and communicate with each other in the knowledge sharing community.The thirst for knowledge exchange and the convenience of the internet make the knowledge sharing community rapidly popular.However,the number of users who are truly willing to produce is very small,and the knowledge sharing community must attract more traffic and create more and better content to develop.Therefore,how to motivate more users to produce higher quality content is worth further study.Scholars have done some research on the motivation of knowledge sharing.They generally divide motivation into internal motivation and external motivation.Among them,internal motivation includes altruism,knowledge selfefficacy,sense of self-worth and so on.External motivations include material rewards,reputation,reciprocity,etc.It is found that both motivations influence users' behavior of sharing knowledge to some extent.However,some research findings seem difficult to understand,such as the fact that community financial rewards to users do not promote more knowledge sharing and sometimes do the opposite,possibly because external motivation has a negative effect on internal motivation.At present,most of the research separates external motivation from internal motivation and studies their independent influence on knowledge sharing.In the field of knowledge sharing,there are few researches on the influence of external motivation on internal motivation.This paper combines external motivation with internal motivation to study whether external motivation has an impact on internal motivation and whether it is positive or negative in the knowledge sharing community.Specifically,there are three goals: 1.Verify that internal motivation can indeed promote knowledge sharing behavior;2.Explore the direct influence of external motivation on internal motivation;3.Explore the moderating role of external motivation in influencing knowledge sharing behavior.The research methods used in this study include literature research,questionnaire survey and data analysis.First,this paper combed and summarized relevant literature to better understand the motivation of users to share knowledge in virtual communities and explore the influence of external rewards on internal motivation.On the premise of reading literature and mastering the theoretical basis,the research objectives and models of this paper are determined.Then,a questionnaire was designed according to the specific project of the model,which was put on various social platforms through the network,and users in the knowledge sharing community were invited to participate in the survey.Finally,descriptive statistics,reliability and validity analysis,factor analysis,structural equation modeling and adjustment regression analysis were carried out by using the data collected from the questionnaire and using excel and SPSS as tools to verify whether the hypothesis is valid.Finally,this paper found that:1.The internal motivation of users can significantly promote users to share knowledge and share high-quality content.This is consistent with our experience and existing research.Internal motivation is considered to be the motivation arising from one's own needs,interests,challenges,etc.When the participants of knowledge sharing are driven by internal motivation,their knowledge sharing behavior does not need any external reward or punishment,because the behavior itself is a reward for them.Therefore,the more internally motivated users are,the more likely they are to share knowledge in virtual communities frequently and with high quality.2.Community rewards can inhibit the internal motivation of users.On the one hand,the existence of community rewards directly reduces the internal motivation of users;On the other hand,community rewards inhibit the relationship between internal motivation and willingness to share knowledge and quality.This is reflected in: users who think that community rewards are more important have relatively low internal motivation,and the curve of internal motivation influencing the willingness and quality of knowledge sharing is also relatively moderate.This shows that the community reward weakens the internal motivation effect is existed,too much external reward will make users feel that this is not a reward,but a kind of pressure,knowledge sharing will not bring a sense of achievement.One result is that he or she answers easy-to-solve questions and tends to share only very basic,simple information with others in order to maximize rewards with limited effort.3.Reciprocity has a significant effect on internal motivation,but the effect is positive,which is different from the hypothetical case.From the results,on the one hand,the existence of the reciprocal tendency of users directly improves the internal motivation of users;On the other hand,reciprocity also promotes the relationship between internal motivation and the willingness and quality of knowledge sharing.The original assumption was that users with high reciprocity tendencies would consider whether the person they were helping would be able to answer their questions in the future,and if that person was of no value to them,that person might not be able to help others because that person believed that others were incapable of giving back to them.One possible explanation for the findings is that the knowledgesharing community is getting more involved and users are interacting more frequently.One can connect with many people,not just a few.Therefore,when users share knowledge,it is not necessary to carefully identify the value of the questioner.When a large amount of knowledge is shared,individuals have more communication objects in the virtual community and are familiar with more people,so they can always establish a certain relationship,that is,a reciprocal relationship.When the sharer also received help from others,he was more likely to help others,that is,he was more altruistic and more proud of the knowledge he shared,that is,he felt more self-efficacy and self-worth.Thus,the reciprocity tendency enhances internal motivation and promotes the relationship between internal motivation and the willingness and quality of knowledge sharing.4.The expectation of reputation also has a significant positive effect on internal motivation,but it has no moderating effect,which is different from the hypothesis.As a result,the expectation of reputation directly improves the internal motivation of users.However,whether the expectation of reputation is high or low does not affect the relationship between internal motivation,willingness to share knowledge and quality.This suggests that the effect of fame on knowledge sharing is similar to that of reciprocity,but to a lesser degree.One possible explanation is that users with a strong tendency toward reciprocity are eager for help from others,and the higher the reputation a user has,the more likely others are to trust and interact with him.Therefore,users eager for fame will pay more attention to their own knowledge efficiency and self-worth,thus contributing more and higher quality content to the community.The shortcomings and prospects of this paper:1.The source of respondents is not controlled,that is,users may come from different knowledge sharing communities.In fact,different knowledge sharing communities may have different users,and these platforms may use different incentives,leading to different user perceptions and habits.For example,some platforms sell on the extensive interaction between users,while others offer a lot of rewards such as virtual points and material object reward.As a result,these users react differently to external factors.In the future,a specific knowledge sharing community can be selected and further studied based on its system of motivating users to eliminate the above unexpected situations.2.The definition of internal motivation is not detailed and comprehensive enough.In fact,much of the existing research on knowledge sharing motivation involves internal motivation.They divided it into specific motivations such as sense of accomplishment,sense of self-worth,and willingness to help others,and studied their influences on knowledge sharing.In order to simplify the model,this paper considers these motivations as internal motivations.However,there may be some differences between these motivations.Perhaps some internal motivations are not easily affected,while others are easily weakened.Therefore,many-to-many research can be carried out in the future,that is,whether there are differences in the influence of a specific external motivation on a specific internal motivation.3.This paper does not consider the original internal motivation of knowledge sharing users.According to the existing research and life experience,if a person is not interested in a certain thing in the first place,he will probably do it after some external reward.If a person is already interested,there is no incentive to offer an external reward.Therefore,in the future,users can be classified in advance into users with high initial internal motivation and users with low initial internal motivation to study whether the influence of external motivation on internal motivation is different in these two groups.4.Although the design of the scale in this paper is based on the existing literature,its reasonable type has not been effectively verified.At the same time,the measurement of motivation,willingness to share knowledge and quality is too subjective,which inevitably leads to deviation.In the future,it may be possible to use more scientific methods to accurately measure the various indicators of users,so that the research results are more impressive.