Motivating Knowledge Contribution in Virtual Communities of Practice: Roots, Progress and Needs

Virtual communities of practice (VCoPs) are increasingly recognized as a way to generate and assimilate organizational knowledge. VCoPs extend Wenger’s (1998) concept of community of practice to the virtual world, using technologies such as web forums, wikis, blogs, email, and social networking software. The success of a VCoP as a knowledge-sharing medium depends on active and useful contribution from members. Encouraging such contribution can be a challenge for managers given the informal, low-regulation environment of a VCoP. Conventional managerial controls and incentives become less significant in motivating contribution, and more intrinsic factors come to the fore. This paper describes the theoretical roots explaining such motivation and progress represented by research applying them to online networks. Our central contention is that a unified theoretical approach, suited to the characteristics of VCoPs, is needed to guide future research. Selfdetermination theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000) is proposed as fulfilling this need.

[1]  C. Daniel Batson,et al.  Altruism and Prosocial Behavior , 2003 .

[2]  E. Deci,et al.  Intrinsic Need Satisfaction: A Motivational Basis of Performance and Weil‐Being in Two Work Settings1 , 2004 .

[3]  A. Bandura.  Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. , 1977, Psychology Review.

[4]  Samer Faraj,et al.  Why Should I Share? Examining Social Capital and Knowledge Contribution in Electronic Networks of Practice , 2005, MIS Q..

[5]  Michael J. Muller,et al.  Understanding the benefit and costs of communities of practice , 2002, CACM.

[6]  P. Blau.  Exchange and Power in Social Life , 1964 .

[7]  Richard D. Johnson,et al.  The Multilevel and Multifaceted Character of Computer Self-Efficacy: Toward Clarification of the Construct and an Integrative Framework for Research , 1998, Inf. Syst. Res..

[8]  E. Deci,et al.  Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. , 2000, The American psychologist.

[9]  K. Cook,et al.  Social Exchange Theory , 1989, Theoretical Sociology.

[10]  R. Vallerand.  Toward A Hierarchical Model of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation , 1997 .

[11]  Alan D. Smith,et al.  Communication and loyalty among knowledge workers: a resource of the firm theory view , 2002, J. Knowl. Manag..

[12]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 .

[13]  Joon Koh,et al.  Knowledge sharing in virtual communities: an e-business perspective , 2004, Expert Syst. Appl..

[14]  Eric T. G. Wang,et al.  Understanding knowledge sharing in virtual communities: An integration of social capital and social cognitive theories , 2006, Decis. Support Syst..

[15]  M. van vugt,et al.  Social identity as social glue: the origins of group loyalty. , 2004, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[16]  Line Dubé,et al.  Towards a Typology of Virtual Communities of Practice , 2006 .

[17]  P. Kollock.  The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace , 1999 .

[18]  Paul Hildreth,et al.  Dualities, distributed communities of practice and knowledge management , 2005, J. Knowl. Manag..

[19]  B. Frey,et al.  Motivation, Knowledge Transfer, and Organizational Forms , 2000 .

[20]  Alexander Ardichvili,et al.  Motivation and barriers to participation in virtual knowledge-sharing communities of practice , 2003, J. Knowl. Manag..

[21]  R. Cropanzano,et al.  Social Exchange Theory: An Interdisciplinary Review , 2005 .

[22]  E. Deci,et al.  Overview of self-determination theory: An organismic-dialectical perspective. , 2002 .

[23]  James D. McKeen,et al.  Creating and Facilitating Communities of Practice , 2004 .

[24]  J. Brown,et al.  Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation , 1991 .

[25]  E. Wenger,et al.  cultivating communities of practice , 2002 .

[26]  S. Ghoshal,et al.  Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage , 1998 .