• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.19-38
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• 2014

This study focused on the role of active knowledge seeking (knowledge browsing and knowledge searching) in the context of virtual community of interest. Knowledge seeking is rarely studied as an antecedent in knowledge management (KM) research. Active knowledge seeking is considered as antecedents of sense of virtual community which mediates to knowledge sharing intention and virtual community promotion. Research hypotheses are tested by applying structure equation modeling with survey data from virtual community members in South Korea. Active knowledge seeking behavior was found to be the strong predictor of sense of virtual community, which, in turn, positively affects knowledge sharing intention and virtual community promotion. Implication to practitioners is to understand and accommodate the members' knowledge seeking efforts, who are potential contributors and promoters of the virtual community. Knowledge seeking, knowledge sharing and promoting virtual community are more of human activities than technology and this study extends the understanding of such human activities. By providing a mechanism of how knowledge seeking and sharing could work harmoniously, a virtuous circle with win-win situation could be achieved in virtual communities.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.71-86
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• 2014

This study investigated knowledge browsing behavior as the factor affecting the increase of knowledge sharing intention. To conduct this study in the specific context of knowledge seeking and sharing behavior of virtual community members, literature on knowledge seeking behavior, meta-knowledge, and knowledge sharing intention was reviewed. Structural Equation Modeling was conducted to analyze survey data to test the research model of this study. The result showed that knowledge browsing have positive effects on creating of virtual community members' subject knowledge and meta-knowledge, which, in turn, affected positively their knowledge sharing intention. One of the main contributions of this study is that knowledge seeking behavior influence one's knowledge sharing intention in a virtual community. Organization managers should consider knowledge seeking behavior as not only a self-interested, consuming activity, but also a productive one through its function of constructing subject knowledge and meta-knowledge.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.41-72
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• 2019

Purpose Virtual communities (VCs) are becoming ever more important in these days, sometimes more than offline communities. Notably, they have become significant sources of knowledge sharing. Therefore, in order to foster a VC, it is very important to understand why people share their knowledge in the VC. Under this background, this paper aims at proposing the behavioral model best explains knowledge sharing activities in VCs. Design/methodology/approach We basically design our behavioral model for knowledge sharing in VCs based on theory of reasoned action (TRA). However, to understand knowledge sharing in VCs better, we specify knowledge sharing by dividing it into knowledge contribution and knowledge use. Also, instead of 'subjective norm', we adopt 'sense of virtual community (SOVC)' as a main social factor, which has been found to be important in the literature. We also include the antecedents such as 'quality of the shared knowledge', 'trust in community members', 'passion of the community leader', 'reciprocity', and 'self efficacy', which affect VC users' attitude towards knowledge sharing and SOVC. To test the hypotheses in our proposed model, we collected 253 valid surveys from the VC users. Structural equation modeling (SEM) using AMOS 23 is employed to assess the relationships proposed as the hypotheses. Findings Major findings are as follows. SOVC positively affects both intention to contribute knowledge and intention to use knowledge. And, trust in community members positively affects the attitude towards knowledge use and SOVC. The attitude towards knowledge use is also affected by the quality of the shared knowledge. Reciprocity is found to strongly positively affect the attitude towards knowledge contribution. However, passion of the community leader and self efficacy are found to have insignificant effect on SOVC and the attitude towards knowledge contribution respectively. Our study sheds a light on how to foster VCs from the perspective of knowledge management.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.119-129
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• 2013

The degree to which people share knowledge has major impacts on the effectiveness of virtual community of practice (VCoP). As an extension to the previous study which investigated the effect of individual cooperative types (cooperator, reciprocator, and free rider) on knowledge sharing, it is investigated how much increase in the degree of cooperation will enhance knowledge sharing when there are more knowledge contributors and strong ties exist across the community. Simulation method is adopted to measure the effect of the cooperative type and tie strength on knowledge sharing. The results reveal that the tie strength positively affects knowledge contribution in VCoP and strongly tied VCoP generates equivalent level of knowledge contribution as that of weakly-tied VCoP with 5% more contributors.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.38-53
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• 2008

This study focuses on identifying motivation factors affecting knowledge sharing behavior in virtual communities. To achieve this research objective, a research model has been developed through two major coordinated theories such as social cognitive theory(self-efficacy and community-related outcome expectation) and social exchange theory (codification effort, image, reciprocity, and enjoyment in helping others). 246 samples have been collected and simple regression and multiple regression methods have been used for empirical analysis. The research result is that self-efficacy has a positive influence on image, reciprocity, enjoyment in helping others, and community-related outcome expectation and thus this result reveals that self-efficacy indirectly affects knowledge sharing behavior. Among the antecedents of knowledge sharing behavior, codification effort, enjoyment in helping others and community-related outcome expectation are significant, but image and reciprocity are not. The research results help to derive practical strategic implications related to knowledge sharing to activate a virtual community.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.95-118
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• 2009

Virtual community, which is formed on the internet, is expected to serve the needs of members for communication, information, and knowledge sharing. The executives of organizations should consider operating strategy of virtual community as a new innovation or knowledge pool since members share knowledge. However, many virtual community have failed due to members' low willingness to engage and furthermore to share knowledge with other members. Thus, there is a need to understand and foster the determinants of members' loyalty in virtual community. The objective of this study is to develop an integrated model designed to investigate and explain the relationships between contextual factors, personal perceptions of virtual community, usefulness, ease of use, familiarity, members' trust, reputation, community trust, attitude, satisfaction and loyalty. Empirical data was collected from 286 internet users and tested using structural equation modeling to verify the fit of the hypothetical model. The results show that the usefulness, familiarity significantly influences attitude and members' trust is significantly influence the community trust. And I confirmed that ease of use and attitude play the role of determinants in making the satisfaction, community trust and reputation influence the satisfaction that have the direct effect to making the loyalty. The results of the study can be used to identify the loyalty in virtual community. By investigating the impacts of contextual factors and personal perceptions on virtual community, the integrated model better explains behavior than other proposed models. This study might help executives of virtual communities and organizations to manage and promote community trust, attitude, satisfaction to stimulate members' willingness to revisit the community and futhermore enhance their virtual community loyalty.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.19-45
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• 2010

Virtual Communities, which are formed on the Internet, are expected to serve the needs of members for e-collaboration, e-communication, information and knowledge sharing. The executives of organizations should consider virtual community as a new innovation or knowledge pool since members share knowledge. However, many virtual community have failed due to members' low willingness to engage and furthermore to share knowledge with other members. Thus, there is a need to understand and foster the determinants of members' sense of belonging behavior in virtual community. This study develops an integrated model designed to investigate and explain the relationships between contextual factors, personal perceptions of virtual community, usability, trust and sense of belonging in using a certain virtual community. Empirical data was collected from 201 and tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) to verify the fit of the hypothetical model. The results show that the perceived usability and community trust of members significantly influences sense of belonging in using the virtual community, and information quality, system quality, familiarity on the virtual community are significantly influence the usability but not reputation. And I confirmed that perceived shared vision and responsiveness play the role of determinants in making the member's trust, perceived risk influence the making community trust in directly. The results of the study can be used to identify the motivation underlying members' sense of belonging in a certain virtual community by investigating the impacts of contextual factors and personal perceptions on virtual community, the integrated model better explains behavior than other proposed models. This study might help executives of virtual communities and organizations to manage and promote these determinants of sense of belonging to stimulate members' willingness to engage the community and futhermore enhance their virtual community loyalty.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.63-82
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• 2009

Virtual community is a social aggregation to attain some goals in an IT-supported virtual space (Lee et al., 2002). As lots of virtual communities generate robust and reliable outputs with low control and low incentive, previous researchers was interested in the questions, "why do they participate?" or "how are they controlled?". But. as Katz (1964) said, the most important part of the high-performing organization is the behaviors of members in the organization. Therefore, this research is to examine the relationship between the performance and the behaviors of participants in the virtual community. First, we propose 6 types of behaviors related to high performance in the virtual community: 'Continuous Attendance', 'Complying with the organizational value, policies, and regulations', 'Protection', 'Suggestion for the improving', 'Self-training', and 'Favorable behavior'. The six types of behaviors are extracted from the framework of Katz (1964) and Brief and Motowidlo (1986). The reason why each behavior is positively related with high-performance is that those who continuously attend have more responsibility than temporary participants do; complying with the rules of a virtual community means that they may make more reliable outcome; 'Protection' is one of the prosocial-behaviors and those who protect the community may concern the benefit of the virtual community when they participate: those who suggest some ideas for improvement may contribute to the virtual community; 'Self-training' behavior means that participants really want to have high quality in their contribution: those who have 'Favorable attitude' consider other members in the virtual community when they participate. Then, we perform an empirical analysis with the survey from participants in the Knowledge service of Naver.com, to show those behaviors are associated with the high-performance. To make the measurement for the six behaviors, we use CVR (content validity ratio) method (Lawshe, 1975), interviewing 12 experts. The dependent variable, performance of participation, is measured by 'ratio of selected answer' given by the Naver.com. We use email survey. We sent 1200 emails to randomly selected participants in the knowledge service and received 282 responses. The results of our empirical analysis show that 4('Continuous Attendance', 'Suggestion for the improving', 'Self-training', 'Favorable attitude') are positively related to the performance, but 2('Complying with the organizational value, policies, and regulations' and 'Protection') are not significant. In line with Fitzgerald (2006), we expect that participants in the virtual community may behave similarly to employees in the off-line firms for the high performance. But 2 behaviors have different results. The reason that the 'Complying with the organizational value' behavior is not sufficiently related to performance is that the motivation of participants is more related to intrinsic pleasure or altruism than external reward. Also, the 'Protection' behavior has no significant relationship with performance, which means that the high-performing participants have little concern about the problems in the community.

• Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.647-658
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• 2018

Modern society is complex and rapidly changing, and knowledge sharing is needed to acquire and create knowledge. Knowledge sharing is the act of providing information knowledge and know-how of their own in order to cooperate with or help their colleagues. This study presents a research model using social capital theory to explain the mobile knowledge sharing behavior of virtual community members. Based on previous studies, social capital theory is divided into structural, relational, and cognitive aspects. It was composed of social interaction ties as a measure of structural aspect, trust as a measure of cognitive aspect, shared language, shared vision and relational aspect. After collecting survey data, factor analysis and regression analysis were performed using SPSS 22. In this way, we examined how the detailed factors of social capital affect information sharing behavior and how the level of knowledge sharing affects community promotion. The results showed that social interaction ties, shared language, shared vision, and trust affect knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing has had a positive impact on community promotion.

• Journal of Agricultural Extension & Community Development
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.153-180
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• 2009

The previous researches about knowledge sharing were proceeded in terms of KMS (Knowledge Management System) in center. However, knowledge sharing is recently applied to Internet space, which is open to every users, as well as KMS, which is qualified for restricted people. For example, some portal sites, such as Naver, the most popular portal in Korea, have virtual spaces to share users' knowledges and it is common that many users use the spaces. Knowledge sharing online, compared with KMS, will be more advanced to promote intention for knowledge sharing because of the character of Internet space that is open to all users. Nevertheless, there are few researches about knowledge sharing in the Internet. Considering this situation, this study is attempted to figure out the factors to promote Internet knowledge sharing, based on social capital theory and self-expression concept. A survey of experienced Internet user and PLS (Partial Least Square) were utilized for analysis. The test of this study reveals that social capital and self-expression are significant factors to influence knowledge sharing intention, and that also personal innovation and self-efficacy are significantly related to the self-expression. However, personal innovation does not have significant impact on social capital. According to the result, self-expression, as well as trust and system itself, has significantly effect on knowledge sharing intention in order to promote knowledge sharing in the Internet.