Knowledge contribution in online question and answering communities: Effects of groups membership

Abstract

Online question and answering community is a popular type of online community for people to seek and share knowledge. After years of development, a recent trend of these communities is to leverage group wisdom by implementing group feature, which allows users to form self-organizing groups and contribute knowledge to the community as group members. This new pattern of user organization poses challenge to extant knowledge sharing literature which so far hasn't considered the effect of group membership on individual knowledge contribution behavior. Drawing on social identity theory, this study proposes that group membership can both directly enhance individual users' knowledge contribution as well as moderate the relationship between the behavioral determinants-MOA (motivation, opportunity and ability) factors and knowledge contribution. A field survey with 367 participants in a leading question and answering community with group feature was conducted to test the research model. Results largely provide support for the model.