A correlational study on the absence of incentives to share knowledge in a virtual community

Extrinsic motivation may affect knowledge sharing in a virtual community. As virtual communities have become ubiquitous, understanding knowledge sharing in virtual communities has become very important. Knowledge sharing is one of the factors that allow virtual communities to be viable. This study sought to observe knowledge sharing in a virtual community, which does not use extrinsic motivation techniques as incentives to share knowledge. This correlation study used a framework that included the elements of social capital and outcome expectations. This study found that extrinsic rewards over time appear not to be important in knowledge sharing. The long term effect may be that extrinsic rewards are much less important than the design of the virtual community and the internal motivation of the members of the virtual community. One-hundred and thirty-three persons participated in this study.