Estimating Contextual Motivating Factors in Virtual Interorganizational Communities of Practice: Peer Effects and Organizational Influences

Abstract

Virtual inter-organizational communities of practice (IOCoPs) enable professionals belonging to different organizations to exchange and share knowledge via computer-mediated interactions. Since knowledge sharing is socially embedded, contextual factors likely play an important role in encouraging individuals' community participation. Specifically, professionals in IOCoPs are embedded in two different social environments: the virtual community where they interact with online peers and organizations where they utilize their knowledge. Therefore it is important to simultaneously study motivating factors generated from these two different contexts, including peer effects within and organizational influences outside the virtual community. In this research, we apply a novel econometric identification method to analyze a unique dataset collected from a virtual IOCoP in the financial trading sector. We find that, after controlling for individual level characteristics, contextual motivating factors from peers and organizations are influential both quantitatively and qualitatively in determining community participation. Differentiating multiple-level motivating factors across different contexts enables us to shed light on various mechanisms that IOCoPs can apply to engage collective learning and knowledge management across organizations.

Trust and reciprocity effect on electronic word-of-mouth in online review communities

“…OCs are defined as geographically dispersed groups in which people interact and share information and knowledge using internet-based technologies (Pai and Tsai, 2016). OC types vary in their purpose (Hagel and Armstrong, 1997) and include online “knowledge sharing communities” (Al-Kurdi et al , 2018), “communities of practice” (Akoumianakis, 2009; Zhao et al , 2018), “blogging communities” (Chu and Kim, 2011), “social media/ networking sites” (Chen and Hung, 2010; Al-Yafi et al , 2018), “health communities” (Fan et al , 2014), “innovation communities” (Debaere et al , 2018), “brand communities” (Zhou et al , 2016), “transactional communities” (Khalifa and Ning Shen, 2008) and “opinion/review communities” (Rathore et al , 2016). Approximately one-third of the world’s population use and participate in some sort of OCs (Balaji et al , 2016), with strong organisational interest in the commercial and social opportunities eWOMs present.…”

Does Context Matter for Value Co-Creation in Smart Learning Services?

“…In the first step, we divided the findings of the context factors into four different context types along the recommendations given by Kim and Kim [21], Zhao et al [22] and Zheng and Yano [11]. After that step, we allocate the context factors found in the literature to the context types.…”

“…At the same time, feedback is available faster from peers than from supervisors [43]. However, peers are not experts, so the recommendations from colleagues are not as professional as those from supervisors [22,43]. Another important social context factor is co-location [21,44].…”

Does Context Matter for Value Co-Creation in Smart Learning Services?

“…Oftentimes, possible context factors in learning processes are difficult to determine because the amount of factors can be very large [11,20]. Thus, various authors develop frameworks to grasp the context within the environmental situation and to reduce the number of context factors [11,21,22]. However, as Hong et al [23] mentioned, the context is often not sufficiently taken into account in the development of artifacts and models.…”

“…On the other hand, peers are one of the most important information sources for new employees [43] because peers have the same status and (almost) the same level of knowledge. Moreover, the relationship between peers is based on a different standard than the one with the supervisor [22]. At the same time, feedback is available faster from peers than from supervisors [43].…”