Estimating Contextual Motivating Factors in Virtual Interorganizational Communities of Practice: Peer Effects and Organizational Influences

Abstract

Virtual inter-organizational communities of practice (IOCoPs) enable professionals belonging to different organizations to exchange and share knowledge via computer-mediated interactions. Since knowledge sharing is socially embedded, contextual factors likely play an important role in encouraging individuals’ community participation. Specifically, professionals in IOCoPs are embedded in two different social environments: the virtual community where they interact with online peers and organizations where they utilize their knowledge. Therefore it is important to simultaneously study motivating factors generated from these two different contexts, including peer effects within and organizational influences outside the virtual community. In this research, we apply a novel econometric identification method to analyze a unique dataset collected from a virtual IOCoP in the financial trading sector. We find that, after controlling for individual level characteristics, contextual motivating factors from peers and organizations are influential both quantitatively and qualitatively in determining community participation. Differentiating multiple-level motivating factors across different contexts enables us to shed light on various mechanisms that IOCoPs can apply to engage collective learning and knowledge management across organizations.