With the theoretical background of these models in mind, motivational factors that have been identified in practical settings of communities of information and support sharing in online environments are discussed.
People participate in various kinds of online communities for different purposes. Ridings & Gefen (2004) collected and analyzed messages shared in 5 different topic areas of online communities (professional, personal interests, pet, health, and sports), and found the four most common reasons that people participate in online communities were information sharing, social support, friendship and recreation. They also found that the degree of emphasis differed across the communities. For example, participants in professional groups were most interested in
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information sharing, and this was followed by social support. Even in recreation and personal interest groups, information sharing was the primary reason for attending online communities and friendship was the second most important reason. In health, interestingly, both information sharing and social support were valued as equally important.
Motivation has been a central focus of research to understand participants‟ behaviors in various kinds of virtual communities. Since the emphasis of the health communities in which we are interested is on both information sharing and social support, research on motivations of contributors in virtual communities of practice and social support groups is reviewed first. The main purpose of virtual communities of practice is knowledge and information sharing. The participants expect to gain knowledge and experience from peers in practice-based community settings. Although health is the main topic of the current research, the review of motivation factors was not limited to the domain of health for two reasons. First, motivations for knowledge sharing in virtual communities can be applicable regardless of the topic of the domain. Second, little is known about the motivations of health professionals who participate in virtual
communities of practice for the purpose of information sharing and social support.
While virtual communities of practice are composed of professionals in certain fields with the purpose of information sharing, participants in social support groups are those who have various levels of background and experiences that they share in the support groups. Despite the distinct characteristics of social support groups, motivation to participate and contribute in health- related social support groups has rarely been explored. This may be because it is assumed that participants in social support groups have common interests and a need to learn about certain diseases and health issues, and these common interests motivate most of them to participate and contribute to social support groups. In the current review, the possible factors motivating participation in social support groups are discussed.
Additionally, motivations of contributors to Wikipedia are examined because contributors to Wikipedia are similar to answerers in social Q&A in that they create and develop written
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documents (articles in Wikipedia, and answers in social Q&A). Further, these documents are in particular domains and are distributed to anonymous people in online environments.
There are also a couple of studies about the motivations of contributors in social Q&A. Although these studies are not focused on the domain of health, they are reviewed as introductory studies useful for developing the motivation framework for the proposed research.
2.3.3.1. Virtual Communities of Practice
One of the common attributes inherent in both social Q&A and virtual communities is that the interaction in both contexts happens among strangers on the Web, who are rarely known to each other in real life. Due to the anonymous nature of the users, there have been many research efforts designed to understand people‟s participation in and contributions to virtual communities, exploring how people build relationships among strangers, and whether it is meaningful to sustain virtual communities. In particular, the motivations of contributors who are willing to share information and provide support to the rest of the members have been a central topic of research on virtual communities.
Tedjamulia et al. (2005) proposed a contribution model of participants in online communities, and argued that motivation to contribute can be prompted by the personal characteristics of participants and environmental factors in online communities. Personal characteristics included self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, need to achieve and trust.
Environmental factors were usability, group identity, and personal responsibility. Wang and Lai (2006) assumed that knowledge sharing can be facilitated by one‟s motivation and capability to distribute information to other members in communities. Reputation, reciprocity, and altruism were identified as motivational factors in the model. Self-efficacy and professional experience were identified as important capabilities of contributors in online communities.
Researchers also have investigated motivational factors inherent within different kinds of virtual communities. Online communities of practice are one of the most popular contexts in
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which to study the motivations of contributors who are willing to share knowledge and
information with the rest of the members of the community to promote the advancement of the domain of practice. A community of practice refers to “a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). It is different from the communities formed for entertainment, because it lays out a place where people gain knowledge from their peers and enhance their own practice in a particular domain. Wenger (1998) emphasized that they are informal places where people are gathered to discuss and solve
problems related to their shared interests. During the process of community participation, domain-specific knowledge is generated and transmitted to the rest of the community and it eventually reinforces the relationships among individual members and the community overall.
Thanks to the advent of the Internet, people can easily be connected to one another and knowledge and practice can be shared by a variety of online communications tools. In
organizations, managers or employers create and manage online communities in order to enhance collaborative work among employees and to encourage them to share tacit knowledge and practices, which are critical assets of a corporation (T. H. Davenport & Prusak, 1998).
Additionally, it supports communication among employees in organizations that are dispersed geographically (Constant, et al., 1996). The informal and remote environments created by online communities can contribute to promote collaboration as they enable people to have access to more than physical communities. Since the communities are created for organizational purpose, leaders or managers are often in charge of the activities, and the participation of members is not always voluntary. In some cases, an incentive or reward system for participation is offered by organizations.
The most interesting aspect of motivating employees to contribute to communities of practice is related to their attitudes concerning whether their knowledge is a personal asset or a public good. In organizations, community attachment/advancement has been identified as an
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important factor in several studies. However, it was not a common feature across organizations, because it depends on the organizational culture. Jarvenpaa and Staples (2001) explained that, when people believe that the ownership of information and expertise belong to organizations, they have positive attitudes about sharing knowledge for the promotion of the organization in general. Within this environment, employees feel a moral obligation to the organization as a whole, and view it as a community of their professionals. Ardichvilli, Page and Wentling (2003) investigated motivation and barriers to participation in online communities of practice at a multinational corporation. The employees were motivated by a moral obligation to the company where they work and to the communal interests of their fellow professionals, rather than their self-interests. In addition, employees who considered themselves experts in the field were willing to contribute in communities because they believed that they are responsible for giving what they learned back to the younger generations of the community. Lin (2007) tested intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of employees in 50 organizations sharing information in communities of practice. He proposed that intrinsic motivation is related to self-efficacy and enjoyment in helping others, and extrinsic motivation is related to expected organizational rewards and reciprocal benefits. He also found that self-efficacy, enjoyment and reciprocal benefits significantly influenced employees‟ motivations and attitudes about sharing information.
On the other hand, Hall (2001b) believed that employees are mainly interested in personal rewards that they could receive as compensation for knowledge exchange in
organizations. He proposed economic rewards, access to information and knowledge, and career advancement or security as explicit/hard rewards. As soft rewards, he suggested enhanced reputation and personal satisfaction. Davenport and Hall (2002) stated that employees decide to share knowledge when the rewards given by organizations match with their own value of knowledge. Hall (2001, 2003) placed the rewards into two categories – tangible and intangible, and the former includes reputation, career promotion, or financial incentives, and the latter refers to access to information, and enhancing practical skills.
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Regarding external incentives or rewards from organizations, there is no consensus about the effect of motivation for knowledge sharing. Lin (2007) found that rewards did not
significantly influence motivation. On the other hand, Milne (2007) tested the effect of incentive programs implemented by an organization for the promotion of knowledge sharing among members, and found that rewards significantly influenced motivation, performance, and interest in knowledge sharing in an organization.
There are also online communities of practice which are created by professionals in a particular domain in order to meet their own needs regardless of the organizations in which they are members. There are no organizations or corporations that control the creation and
management of the communities. Anyone who is interested in the domain can join and the members share knowledge and practice voluntarily. They participate in communities not only for their personal needs, or to improve their knowledge and skills, but also for the enhancement of the community.
Wasko and Faraj (2000) investigated the motivation for knowledge sharing of three Usenet newsgroups on programming language and technology, and found that participants were motivated by tangible returns, intangible returns, and community interest. Tangible returns included access to useful information and expertise, answers to specific questions, and personal gain. Intangible returns included enjoyment/entertainment and learning. Community Interest included interaction with a community, multiple viewpoints, peer group, altruism, reciprocity, and advancement of the community. Five years later, Wasko and Faraj (2005) developed a model of knowledge contribution based on individual motivation and the theory of social capital. This new model included only three motivational factors – reputation, enjoyment, and reciprocity – from among the many factors that they had proposed in their previous studies.
Among a number of different topic domains of communities of practice, open source communities have been spotlighted in recent years due to their proliferation and contribution to the advancement of software technology. In open source communities, highly educated
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programmers/engineers voluntarily participate in and collaborate with peers on developing products without the intervention of organizations or corporations (J. Moon & Sproull, 2002). Thanks to their independence, it results in a huge impact on the advancement of the public good in society, such as distributing open source software (e.g., Linux and Apache Web Server) free of charge. This community has also challenged the traditional commercial-value-oriented market approach to software development. The open source movement has flourished as commercial software companies (e.g., IBM, Sun Microsystems, etc.) have become part of the movement and started to reveal source code to the public (Hars & Ou, 2001).
Raymond (1999), a senior programmer who is one of the early, experienced contributors in open source communities, wrote an essay to illustrate the nature of the open source community. In it, he argued that programmers had three basic motives to develop open source software: 1) direct benefits from the source code development, 2) self-enjoyment, and 3) reputation
enhancement (Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003). Since then a number of studies have been conducted in order to confirm Raymond‟s speculation.
Hars and Ou (2001) divided the motivations of programmers to contribute in an open source community into internal and external factors. Internal factors included self-determination, altruism, and community identification, and external factors were future rewards (selling products, human capital, self-marketing, peer-recognition) and personal needs for software development. Self-determination, such as the feeling of competence, satisfaction, and fulfillment, was the most influential as an internal factor, while altruism was less important. At the same time, many of them were interested in the external benefits of building a reputation for themselves and
marketing their abilities in order to be recruited by human resources staff or senior engineers who are searching for talented programmers in open source communities. In another study, Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) tested generalized reciprocity, community interest, reputation, intrinsic rewards, and job responsibility as the main factors of motivation in open source communities.
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They found similar results to Hars and Ou‟s (2001) study that both reputation and intrinsic rewards were recognized as important factors.
Additionally, learning is an important factor motivating programmers and engineers to contribute to open source communities. Learning in community is a benefit not only for the novice or inexperienced members, but also for members who have advanced levels of expertise and experience. In open source communities, programmers enhance their personal skills, capabilities and knowledge as they participate in the various activities of coding new and advanced programs. They can use the community participation as an opportunity to train themselves, ultimately leading to find better jobs, to increasing their salaries, and more (Hars & Ou, 2001). Ye and Kishida (2003) emphasized that participants in open source communities valued learning through experiences and engagement in the social, cultural and technical practice of the community. In addition, learning is an important factor that can provide both intrinsic satisfaction and extrinsic rewards for individuals, as well as address the social needs of gaining reputation and recognition among members as an advanced developer who has skills and knowledge in developing programs.
Product development, as an extrinsic reward, was also recognized as a benefit for members in open source communities. It is different from the financial incentives given as rewards in organizations, such as extra compensation as a result of participation. Product development is intentionally brought about by members to obtain recognition from the community (Hars & Ou, 2001; Hertel, Niedner, & Herrmann, 2003; Raymond, 1999).
Reputation has been known as one of the strong motives for active participation in knowledge sharing in general (Donath, 1999), as well as in online environments of professionals (Stewart, 2003). This assertion has been supported by the findings from Wasko and Faraj‟s (2005) finding that, in virtual communities of legal professionals, reputation was the key factor
encouraging participation. However, according to Wang and Lai‟s (2006) study about the motivations behind the posting of Java-related topics on bulletin board systems, reputation is not
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positively related to knowledge sharing; due to the anonymity of members in virtual communities, reputation does not motivate as effectively as in real-life communities. The reason for the
difference is likely to be related to the method of dealing with one‟s identity in virtual
communities. In the legal community in Wasko and Faraj‟s (2005) study, their real names were used to share information, while the online identification names were used in the technical group studied by Wang and Lai (2006). The differences between the domains, legal vs. technology, may also influence the results if they were tested in the same environment, but nothing has been tested yet.
The opposing results of the two studies may also be related to the influences of self- enjoyment and self-efficacy. In legal communities, self-enjoyment did not play a role in motivating participants to make contributions. In the technical community, however, self- enjoyment and self-efficacy were identified as influential factors. Enjoying helping others is one of the intriguing characteristics which is often found in electronic networks on the Internet in general (Kollock & Smith, 1996), but it was not true in legal communities. According to Wang and Lai (2006), self-enjoyment and self-efficacy were positive factors, but altruism was not. The researchers predicted that the size of the virtual community, about 50,000 participants, may deflect participation due to the participants‟ awareness of the number of bystanders.
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Table 2.3. Motivational Factors of Participants in Virtual Communities of Practice
Category Identified Factors Literature Personal Characteristics Self-Enjoyment / Personal satisfaction
Constant et al. (1996); Lin (2007); Hall (2001, 2002); Wang & Lai (2006); Wasko & Faraj (2000); Hertel, et al. (2003); Lakhani & von Hippel (2003); Niedner, Hertel, & Hermann (2000); Raymond (1999) ;
Self-efficacy / Self-competent
Kankanhalli (2005); Lin (2007); Wang & Lai (2006); Wasko & Faraj (2000); Hars & Ou (2001); Lakhani & von Hippel (2003); Lakhani & Wolf (2002)
Altruism Constant et al. (1996); Wasko & Faraj (2000); Hars & Ou (2001)
Personal Benefits
Learning / access to information
Constant et al. (1996); Hall (2001, 2002); Niedner, Hertel, & Hermann (2000); Wasko & Faraj (2005);, Wang & Lai (2006); Wasko & Faraj (2000); Hars & Ou (2001); Lakhani & Wolf (2002); Ye & Kishida (2003)
Reputation/ Recognition
Constant et al. (1996); Hall (2001, 2002); Lerner & Tirole (2001); Niedner, Hertel, & Hermann (2000); Wasko & Faraj (2005); Wang & Lai (2006); Hars & Ou (2001); Hertel, et al. (2003); Lakhani & von Hippel (2003); Lakhani & Wolf (2002); Raymond (1999)
Financial Incentives
Constant et al. (1996); Hall (2001, 2002); Kankanhalli et al. (2005); Milne (2007);
Product Development
Johnson (2002); Niedner, Hertel, & Hermann (2000); Wasko & Faraj (2000); Hars & Ou (2001); Hertel, et al. (2003); Raymond (1999);
Community Interest
Reciprocity
Constant et al. (1996);Davenport & Prusak (1998); Kollock (1999); Lin (2007); Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995); Leonard & Sensiper (2000); Wasko & Faraj (2000); Lakhani & von Hippel (2003); Lakhani & Wolf (2002)
Community attachment / advancement
Ardichvilli et al. (2003); Constant et al. (1996); Osterloh & Frey (2000); Preece (2000); Wasko & Faraj (2000); Hars & Ou (2001); Hertel, et al. (2003); Lakhani & von Hippel (2003) Gift-giving
culture
Zeitlyn (2003); Raymond (1999)
Table 2.3 summarizes of the motivational factors identified by researchers of people who participate in virtual communities of practice. First, personal characteristics indicate inherent personal attributes of individuals. Self-enjoyment refers to people sharing knowledge because they like to do it and enjoy the situation of communicating with others. They feel pleasure and satisfaction from their own behaviors of helping others. Self-efficacy refers to ones‟ confidence about his/her capability to perform an action (Bandura, 1986). When people feel that they have enough knowledge and expertise in a particular subject, and that this will help others, it positively
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influences them to participate in virtual communities. Altruism is another important concept to describe an internal aspect of human beings, indicating that people like to help others without thinking about any compensation or reward, only caring for others and the world in which they belong.
Second, people contribute in open source communities with an expectation of getting some benefits. Through community participation and contribution, people often expect that they can learn and obtain information about job opportunities, or enhance their professional skills related to their field or areas of interest. While learning something through activities in virtual communities is an indirect benefit that people obtain through participation, there are also direct benefits such as building recognition and reputation, receiving external rewards or incentives, and obtaining personal gains, such as selling or developing products of one‟s own.
While the previous two categories show the internal factors of individuals that motivate them to contribute to knowledge sharing, community interest emphasize the social and
collaborative aspect of virtual communities. Reciprocity is a situation in which a person helps another because he or she expects to receive help from that particular person in return. However,