Online discussion communities have become a widely used medium for interaction, enabling conversations across a broad range of topics and contexts. Their success, however, depends on participants' willingness to invest their time and attention in the absence of formal role and control structures. Why, then, would individuals choose to return repeatedly to a particular community and engage in the various behaviors that are necessary to keep conversation within the community going? Some studies of online communities argue that individuals are driven by self-interest, while others emphasize more altruistic motivations. To get beyond these inconsistent explanations, we offer a model that brings dissimilar rationales into a single conceptual framework and shows the validity of each rationale in explaining different online behaviors. Drawing on typologies of organizational commitment, we argue that members may have psychological bonds to a particular online community based on (a) need, (b) affect, and/or (c) obligation. We develop hypotheses that explain how each form of commitment to a community affects the likelihood that a member will engage in particular behaviors (reading threads, posting replies, moderating the discussion). Our results indicate that each form of community commitment has a unique impact on each behavior, with need-based commitment predicting thread reading, affect-based commitment predicting reply posting and moderating behaviors, and obligation-based commitment predicting only moderating behavior. Researchers seeking to understand how discussion-based communities function will benefit from this more precise theorizing of how each form of member commitment relates to different kinds of online behaviors. Community managers who seek to encourage particular behaviors may use our results to target the underlying form of commitment most likely to encourage the activities they wish to promote.

Much of the knowledge management (KM) literature focuses on ways to increase the volume of knowledge available to employees, ensure its quality, and improve its accessibility. Such supply-side arguments are limited to the extent that they do not address the demand for knowledge within organizations. This paper takes a novel approach to understanding how access to others' knowledge produces benefits by studying the extent to which individuals intentionally access each other's expertise, experience, insights, and opinions, which we term knowledge sourcing. A general model of knowledge sourcing, including contextual and dispositional antecedents and learning outcomes, is proposed and validated using survey data from a global organization. Knowledge sourcing explains a significant proportion of individuals' learning outcomes, but the strength of this effect is moderated both by the strength of individuals' learning orientations and the degree to which they find their jobs to be intellectually demanding. For researchers, this study extends existing knowledge by proposing, testing, and validating a new way to understand an important KM issue in organizations. Practitioners can use these findings to evaluate existing KM efforts and better target future KM interventions towards those individuals most likely to benefit.knowledge management, knowledge sourcing, knowledge transfer, learning motivation, performance

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AlexAndrA durcikovA is an Assistant Professor at the Eller college of Management, university of Arizona. She earned her Ph.D. in Information Systems from university of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include knowledge management and knowledge management systems, the role of organizational climate in the use of knowledge management systems, and IS issues in developing countries. Dr. Durcikova's research appears in the Journal of Management Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, as well as in various national and international conference proceedings.Peter GrAy is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the McIntyre School of commerce, university of Virginia. He has a background in electronic commerce and online information systems, having worked in various information technology and management consulting positions. Dr. Gray researches the intersection of cognition and technology, and focuses on the individual and organizational effects of social technologies, such as knowledge management systems, online communities, and other technologies that enable virtual interaction. His research has been published in AbstrAct: to ensure that knowledge repositories contain high-quality knowledge, knowledge management research recommends that contributions to a repository undergo stringent validation processes. to date, however, no research has studied the impact of such processes on contributors' repository-related perceptions or behaviors. to address this gap, we develop a model based on signaling theory and reinforcement theory to explain how individuals' perceptions of three primary validation process characteristics (duration, transparency, and restrictiveness) impact their perceptions of repository knowledge quality and their contribution behaviors. Our empirical results confirm the importance of implementing review processes that are transparent and developmentally oriented as a way of encouraging knowledge contribution. More broadly, this study underscores the need to develop integrated theoretical models that draw from a variety of reference theories when attempting to explain knowledge-related behaviors. key words And PhrAses: knowledge contribution processes, knowledge management, knowledge repositories, knowledge sharing, knowledge sourcing, reinforcement theory, signaling theory, validation processes. over the PAst decAde, reseArchers And mAnAGers have investigated methods for improving organizational performance by providing employees with better ways of Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 08:56 24 August 2015 82 DurcIkOVA AND GrAy