An Empirical Study on the Relationship between Performance and Behaviors of Participants in the Knowledge Sharing Virtual Community

지식공유 가상커뮤니티에서 사용자의 성과와 행동에 관한 실증연구

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.