The Research On Poster And Lurker’s Knowledge-sharing Intention In Virtual Interest Community

Nowadays,network technology develops very rapidly,the Internet breaks the geographical restrictions,allows users who have the same interests to get together.There are increasing number of virtual interest communities,which are established with a particular brand,topic and other content,and the members involved in those communities gradually grow large.The anonymity of members’ identities helps create a discussing space with high degree of openness and freedom.The most important indicator of whether the community is prosperous is the liveness of knowledge-sharing activities among members.However,existing research has shown that a large number of virtual community users are lurkers,who rarely share knowledge with other community members and just take the community as the space for searching and browsing information they need.Lurking,as a kind of passive behavior in participating in virtual community,will decrease the liveness of the whole community and then decreases the community’s value.Current scholars usually take the posters and lurkers as a whole research objective;the distinction between the two groups is not enough.At the same time,previous research on the driving factors of community members’ knowledge sharing intention ignores the type of community,and mainly focuses on professional virtual communities.Whereas,different operational objectives and constituent elements of different types of virtual communities may lead to the different driving factors of members’ knowledge sharing intention,thus it is very crucial to conduct sub-group research,which helps understand knowledge sharing intention in different types virtual communities.The researcher conducted literature review based on previous studies,analyzed and reorganized scholars’ research results on virtual community and factors that influence members’ knowledge sharing intention in virtual community.Then introducing attribution theory,divided influence factors of knowledge sharing intention into internal driving factors and external driving factors these two aspects,and then explored the distinction between posters and lurkers.The study found that the reputation had a positive role in promoting of the posters and lurkers’ knowledge sharing intention,while the impact on the posters wassignificantly greater than the impact on lurkers.And what was different from the poster group was that lurkers have high expectations on reciprocity.Community identification and trust for the community management both had positive impact on lurkers and posters’ knowledge sharing intention,but the impact was not significant.Pleasure from helping others had a significant positive impact on the poster groups’ knowledge sharing intention;the impact on lurkers groups was not significant.The impact of knowledge sharing of self-efficacy had on posters’ knowledge sharing intention was greater than lurkers.Conclusions showed that the two groups’ driving factors’ of knowledge sharing intention was different,virtual communities’ operators can responsively encourage different kinds of users to maintain and strengthen community activity.In this study,there are still many points that need to strengthen;researchers can conduct in-depth study of the limitations of in future and improve the relevance and application value.