| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 資訊管理研究所 === 97 === Due to the rapid development of the Internet, virtual communities are growing at an unprecedented rate. Users’ needs for a virtual community not only limit to chat or make friends, but also regard it as a knowledge exchange platform to communicate with others. Nowadays, there are a variety of knowledge-based professional virtual communities.
This paper proposes an integrated model by intergrating the Social Capital Theory and intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of individuals to investigate motivations behind people''s knowledge sharing in professional virtual communities, and understanding why the kindness of strangers exist.
Data collected from 207 users of the JavaWorld@TW professional virtual community which include 53 contributors and 154 lurkers provide investigation for the proposed model and hypotheses. Results suggest that trust and pro-sharing norms mediate between shared understanding and knowledge sharing attitude in the model of all samples and lurkers. Besides, results show that enjoyment helping others, commitment, and community-related outcome expectations enhance contributors’ attitudes toward knowledge sharing. Reciprocity and community-related outcome expectations will influence lurkers’ knowledge sharing. It is found from our samples that extrinsic and intrinsic motivations of contributors are different from those of lurkers.
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