A Study On The Influencing Factors Of Tacit Knowledge Transfer In Tourism Virtual Communities

The existence of the Internet makes people be able to carry out information exchange activities with each other even though they do not know about each other or being separated by thousands of miles, the increasing number of Chinese net citizen and Internet penetration rate makes it more convenient for people to treat Internet as a information exchange platform, all sort of virtual communities also emerge as the times require. Tourism virtual community as one of them, provides an important platform of information exchange and tacit knowledge transfer for tourists. In this article, the author mainly considered about four parts: actors, media, content and context, after that the author constructed a model of factors which influencing the user’s activity of tacit knowledge transfer in tourism virtual community. The author used questionnaire survey to obtain first-hand data, tested the model by using Statistical Product and Service Solutions 20.0. This empirical study found that self efficacy, community incentive, characteristics of tacit knowledge, trust and mutual benefit turned out to be the mainly influence factors. The degree of influence from large to small is as follows: self efficacy, community incentive, characteristics of tacit knowledge, mutual benefit and then trust. In addition, the tacit knowledge transfer behavior has obvious differences when the users have the different degree of educated, registered length or different forms of participation. Compare the user from the group which only have junior high school degree with higher education level, it turned out their tacit knowledge transfer behavior has obvious differences, the users who only registered within half year have significant differences with the users who had registered more than one year, it appears the users who enjoy offering information have no obvious differences with those who seek for travel together partners, but have significant differences between those who just browsing information or seeking for help. The author put forward several feasible suggestions to promote the tacit knowledge transfer among the users in tourism virtual community at the end of this research, including to enhance the tourism virtual community user’s self efficacy, establish and improve the motivation techniques, make sure it can be carried out, make good use of characteristics of tacit knowledge, increase the trust degree among the users, create mutually beneficial community atmosphere, make the tourism virtual community better from all angles.