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The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of organizational rewards on two forms of knowledge sharing – explicit knowledge sharing and tacit knowledge sharing in virtual communities, and further to explore the mediating effect of intrinsic motivation on the effect of virtual community rewards on implicit knowledge sharing.

Based on relevant knowledge sharing theories, this study develops an integrated framework to explore virtual community rewards and tacit and explicit knowledge sharing in a virtual context. This study then collected data from 429 virtual community users in four virtual communities via an online survey. Hierarchical regression analyzes were used to test the proposed research model.

The results of this study show that virtual rewards have a significantly positive linear relationship with explicit knowledge sharing but have an inverse U-shape relationship with tacit knowledge sharing in virtual communities. In addition, intrinsic motivations including enjoyment and self-efficacy mediate the relationship between rewards and tacit knowledge sharing.

This study suggests more virtual community rewards may not always lead to more tacit knowledge sharing. Instead, too many rewards may weaken the motivation for tacit knowledge sharing. Knowledge management practitioners should make full use of the positive impact of self-efficacy and enjoyment to set up appropriate reward incentives to encourage knowledge-sharing, in particular, tacit knowledge sharing and to better manage virtual communities.

This study explores knowledge-sharing behavior in virtual communities, an important step toward more integrated knowledge-sharing theories. While online communities have become increasingly important for today’s knowledge economy, few studies have explored knowledge and knowledge sharing in a virtual context and this study helps to bridge the gap. In addition, this study develops an integrated framework to explore the mechanism through which virtual community rewards affect knowledge sharing with intrinsic motivation mediating this relationship in online communities, which further enriches the understanding on how to use virtual rewards to motivate knowledge sharing behaviors in the virtual context.

This paper aims to examine interrelations of the team environment factors of trust and affiliation and the motivation factors of perceived reciprocal benefits and importance of enjoyment to determine how they influence knowledge sharing within loose-linked global virtual teams.

The study involved 115 business students from three large universities located in the USA, China and Peru being assigned to global virtual teams of between three and four members in one phase and between four and seven members in a second phase. Students were required to work in virtual teams using telecommunication tools to complete assigned cases.

Trust, reciprocal benefits and enjoyment are significantly related to positive attitude toward knowledge sharing. Positive attitude, enjoyment, age, nationality and computer experience are positively related to knowledge sharing behavior. Affiliation is not found to significantly affect positive knowledge sharing attitude. Gender is not related to knowledge sharing behavior.

Understanding how trust, affiliation and motivation influence positive attitude and knowledge sharing behavior can assist managers in developing intervention strategies that improve team environments to support knowledge sharing behavior.

This paper contributes to the advancement of theory by extending the current knowledge sharing research to virtual team environments with diverse cultural backgrounds and by considering both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation factors, including the importance of enjoyment in loose-linked environments of global virtual teams.

Due to geographic dispersion and reliance on technology-mediated communication, developing collaborative capital can be a challenge in a virtual team. Knowledge sharing is one form of collaborative capital that has been identified as critical to virtual team success. This chapter develops a theoretical model that proposes that shared leadership in virtual teams is positively related to knowledge sharing between team members, and that this relationship will be partially mediated by trust. The model also shows that a team's degree of reliance on technology-mediated communication will moderate the relationships in the model.

Prior research indicates that the success of a virtual community relies on its ability to allow community members to share knowledge interactively. Wiki applications are web‐based hypertext applications that facilitate collaborative authoring, and have been widely adopted by virtual communities to facilitate knowledge sharing and accumulation. Nevertheless very few studies have empirically investigated the dynamics of how these applications contribute to the development and continuity of virtual communities by enhancing the knowledge sharing intentions of community members. This paper aims to address these issues.

A theoretical model was developed to explain and predict the knowledge sharing intentions of virtual community members. Survey data collected from 232 wiki community members were examined using structural equation modelling to verify the theoretical model.

The research results confirm the positive influence of the use of wiki applications on knowledge sharing intention through the mediating effects of member interactions, community participation, and community promotion. However it was found that community trust and community identification had no significant effect on knowledge sharing intention.

Very few studies have empirically investigated the relationships among the characteristics of wiki applications, virtual community outcomes (participation, promotion, trust, and identification), and the knowledge sharing intentions of virtual community members. The research findings can enrich our understanding of how wiki or other similar technologies affect the sharing of knowledge within virtual communities. This can, in turn, provide both virtual community administrators and managers of organisations with guidelines for creating successful knowledge sharing practices.

The limited proximal communication between virtual team members can create a lack of trust among members which can significantly reduce the effectiveness of these teams. Hence, this study was conducted to examine the relationship between trust and virtual team effectiveness by looking into the mediating effect of knowledge sharing.

This is a cross-sectional study conducted in a multinational company in Malaysia. Questionnaires were distributed to individuals working in a virtual environment. The questionnaire required the respondents to answer questions regarding three different types of trust (i.e. personality-based trust, institutional-based trust and cognitive-based trust), their knowledge sharing behavior, and their evaluation of the effectiveness of the virtual teams that they are involved with.

Results of hierarchical regression analysis indicated that knowledge sharing and all the three types of trust are significantly related to virtual team effectiveness. However, only personality-based trust and institutional-based trust are significantly related to knowledge sharing, but knowledge sharing only partially mediates the relationship between these two types of trust and team effectiveness.

The population of this study are virtual teams working for an organization, hence the generalizability of the findings to other settings is unknown.

Trust has been founded to be a significant predictor of virtual team effectiveness. However, this paper shows the effect of different types of trust and the role of knowledge sharing in mediating the relationship between trust and virtual team effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question: why Google Answers and Yahoo! Kimo Knowledge+, both virtual communities built on users asking and answering questions with different rewarding mechanisms, have different outcomes.

Based on the theory of reasoned action (TRA), the authors developed the constructs, including self‐efficacy, altruism, reward, and the sense of virtual community, that influence the intention of sharing knowledge in terms of answering questions on Knowledge+.

The results show that users showing higher levels of contribution tended to be motivated by virtual rewards, such as advanced ranks, and the need for self‐fulfillment. Additionally, for these knowledge providers, altruism is also an important factor. Therefore, these users share not because of a reward but because of altruism and fulfillment. The findings can answer why Google Answers failed with its monetary rewards but Knowledge+ remains with its virtual rewarding mechanism.

This study extends the literature on understanding the antecedents of sharing knowledge in terms of answering others’ questions in virtual communities. Especially, it identifies different factors affecting the intention of users in different levels of engagement with the community to share knowledge.

The various effective factors influencing users’ knowledge sharing behavior identified in this study can guide the incentive mechanism design for virtual communities.

Besides proposing research models to identify the constructs affecting the users’ intention to answer questions in a virtual community, such as Knowledge+, this study compares the models explaining the intention to share knowledge in different user groups with different levels of knowledge contribution. This research design is unique from the prior literatures; Moreover, the results shed light on designing incentive mechanisms for knowledge sharing in virtual communities.

Knowledge sharing has played an important role in the proliferation of virtual communities. However little research has provided an integrated view of knowledge sharing for a general-purpose (non-professional) virtual community. This study aims to suggest that four driving forces, i.e. utilitarian motivation, hedonic motivation, control belief (self-efficacy) and contextual force (sharing culture), motivate users' attitudes toward knowledge sharing.

The research participants are knowledge contributors who participate in general-purpose virtual communities. A total of 473 valid questionnaires were collected. Structural equation modelling was used to test the research hypothesis.

The results show that users' attitude toward knowledge is determined by all four key forces: utilitarian motivation (reciprocity, reputation), hedonic motivation (enjoying helping), control belief (self-efficacy) and contextual force (sharing culture). Users' attitude, self-efficacy and sharing culture have an effect on continuance intention to share knowledge.

Contrary to prior studies of professional knowledge sharing, this study found that hedonic motivation is more important than utilitarian motivation in terms of intention to continue sharing knowledge.

Virtual community service providers should provide mechanisms for users to enjoy helping others, refine utilitarian benefits by improving honour and rewards systems, support a fair and open sharing culture, and help users to gain a stronger sense of competence as successful knowledge sharers.

This study articulates and empirically validates an integrated model of knowledge sharing. It helps researchers better understand continued knowledge sharing behaviour in virtual communities.

This study aims to test the relationship between virtual knowledge sharing (VKS) and team effectiveness (TE) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also explores the moderating role of collaborative technologies.

This is a cross-sectional study conducted in the service sector of India. A purposive sample of 321 knowledge workers from National Capital Region of India was used. Questionnaires were distributed to knowledge workers working in a virtual environment. The hypotheses were tested with confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) using partial least square-SEM.

The study reveals that, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual knowledge sharing (VKS) positively affects team effectiveness (TE). Furthermore, the impact of VKS on TE is contingent upon the utilization of collaborative technologies.

The study contributes to the existing literature by exploring the impact of VKS on TE during the COVID-19 pandemic and the importance of collaborative technologies in facilitating virtual team collaboration, which has practical implications for organizations seeking to enhance TE in virtual environments.

With the development of Web 2.0 virtual communities, the authors see a useful platform for knowledge sharing. However, knowledge sharing in virtual communities still remains a big challenge given the concern of knowledge quantity and quality. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of individual differences on knowledge contributing, knowledge seeking, trust and norm of reciprocity. This study also explores the mean difference between knowledge seeking and knowledge contributing as well as the correlations between knowledge seeking, knowledge contributing, trust and reciprocity so as to provide some guidance for knowledge management practice in China.

Data collected from 430 users of Web 2.0 virtual communities were used for data analysis. The independent samples t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), paired samples t-test and correlation analysis were employed.

The independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA present the effect of individual differences on knowledge contributing, knowledge seeking, trust and norm of reciprocity. The paired samples t-test suggests that employees are more likely to seek knowledge from than contribute knowledge to Web 2.0 virtual communities. The correlation analysis suggests there are positive correlations between knowledge contributing, knowledge seeking, trust and reciprocity.

Knowledge management initiatives in Chinese organizations are encountered relatively less frequently, compared with western countries. The authors suggest the findings of this study provide useful insights into the informal knowledge sharing in Web 2.0 virtual communities, which is helpful for guiding knowledge management practice in China.

Based on knowledge quantity and knowledge quality whose significance cannot be over-emphasized in virtual communities, this study explores employee perceptions of Web 2.0 virtual communities from the perspective of knowledge sharing, which the authors think provides a new view for knowledge sharing research and practice alike in China.

The adoption of emerging information and communication technologies in construction project teams has engendered numerous virtual spaces, characterized by communication visibility and content persistence. As a result, the knowledge exchanged in these virtual spaces serves as a team’s digital resources. However, the extant literature mostly takes a process-based approach to examine the impact of knowledge sharing, thus failing to fully comprehend the process of converting digital resources into performance, resulting in a gap in the literature.

This study employs team resource-based theory to construct a theoretical model and develop hypotheses. Specifically, knowledge integration capability and team efficacy are hypothesized as two types of critical capabilities that mediate the links between knowledge sharing (quantity and quality) in virtual spaces and management performance. Data from 128 middle and senior construction project managers were collected to test the proposed theoretical model.

The results suggest that relationships between knowledge sharing (quantity and quality) and project management performance are both mediated by knowledge integration capability. Moreover, team efficacy could only partially translate knowledge sharing quantity into performance and couldn’t transform knowledge sharing quality into performance. Besides, knowledge integration is found to strengthen the link between knowledge sharing quantity and performance but weaken the relationship between knowledge sharing quality and performance.

This study explores how knowledge shared in virtual spaces could be leveraged for improving management performance in construction project teams. The findings in this study enhance the understanding of knowledge sharing in digital environments and afford important insights into transforming digital resources into performance within construction project teams.