| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 資訊管理所 === 92 === Virtual communities (VCs) are places where people with common interests share knowledge on the Internet. The rapid growth of virtual communities on the Internet and accompanying surge in interest by researchers raises the question of what encourages members of a virtual community to learn from, contribute to, and collectively build upon the community’s knowledge. Many researchers have observed that knowledge sharing in virtual communities primarily is about people and environment rather than technical development. Social capital focuses on the environmental factors such as interactions between knowledge producers and knowledge recipients. Previous researches have suggested that social capital strongly influence the extent to which interpersonal knowledge sharing occurs. Social capital facilitates the quality of the shared knowledge, which leads to the satisfaction with the VC. In addition to the social capital which fosters producers’ willingness to contribute knowledge, their capabilities of accomplishing it is also an important variable in explaining the behavior of online knowledge sharing. This research integrate two theories-- social capital and self efficacy and try to find the main factors which effect the knowledge sharing satisfaction in virtual communities. Seven research hypotheses derived from this model are empirically validated using a field survey of 220 members of nine types of VCs registered in Yahoo.com. The results suggest that members’ satisfaction to share knowledge is determined by sharing behavior and their knowledge quality. Knowledge quality is influenced by cognitive
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dimension and relational dimension of social capital. However knowledge sharing self-efficacy is not influenced by social capital.
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