A Study Of Motivation Patterns On Individual Knowledge Contribution In The Virtual Communities

The rise of virtual communities has been considered as an important promotion in the knowledge management research over the past decade. However, the existing of the virtual communities can not be a promise for knowledge sharing. As they did throughout the 1990s, many researchers study on the factors of individual knowledge contribution in the virtual communities from the aspects as psychology, sociology and economics. Even though there have been many researches studying the problem from three points of view, i.e. individual motivation, technology and culture of virtual communities and knowledge itself, there is still a large space for the research about relationship of the inner sub-factors, which affecting knowledge contribution.Based on the review of the literature in this area, the paper abstracts the individual motivational factors in the foregone research and discovers the conflicts among them. These conflicts are induced by the ignoring of the relationship of the inner sub-factors. Furthermore, the paper summaries the multiple inner sub-factors into three domains, i.e. intrinsic domain, extrinsic domain and community domain, and then establishes a conceptual framework focusing on the relationship of the three domains. After that, the framework is validated and modified by an empirical research. It is confirmed that extrinsic domain is negative related to intrinsic and community domains. Based on this conclusion, the implication is noteworthy for both researchers and practitioners.