• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.23-38
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to find factors affecting knowledge sharing activities which have two aspects-quantity and quality. We surveyed the members of a virtual community of practice called "UPOW.com". It is dedicated to sharing knowledge about job related problems, questions, experience of educational official. This study derived factors from social cognitive theory and social capital theory. The findings of the study can be summarized as follows; first, quality of shared knowledge and quantity of knowledge sharing both have positive effect on knowledge utilization. Second, individual factors and social relations have positive effect on quantity of knowledge sharing. However, individual factors' effects on quantity of knowledge sharing are not significant. These results have academic implications to find factors affecting both side of knowledge sharing. Also these finding will give an insight to develop virtual community of practice for an organization's sustained competitiveness.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.119-129
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• 2013

The degree to which people share knowledge has major impacts on the effectiveness of virtual community of practice (VCoP). As an extension to the previous study which investigated the effect of individual cooperative types (cooperator, reciprocator, and free rider) on knowledge sharing, it is investigated how much increase in the degree of cooperation will enhance knowledge sharing when there are more knowledge contributors and strong ties exist across the community. Simulation method is adopted to measure the effect of the cooperative type and tie strength on knowledge sharing. The results reveal that the tie strength positively affects knowledge contribution in VCoP and strongly tied VCoP generates equivalent level of knowledge contribution as that of weakly-tied VCoP with 5% more contributors.