An empirical study on the impact of platform environmental factors on knowledge sharing in virtual communities

Abstract

BackgroundIn the knowledge economy era, the effective acquisition and application of knowledge has become a key element for enterprises to obtain a competitive advantage. The rapid development of the Internet has spawned a large number of virtual communities, providing a convenient channel for organizations and individuals to share knowledge. However, while virtual communities provide users with knowledge-sharing channels, there is also a common phenomenon that users' participation enthusiasm is not high. The social cognitive theory emphasizes the important influence of environmental factors on the development of things. ObjectiveTo study the influencing factors of knowledge sharing from the perspective of the virtual community platform environment, which will help to improve the construction of the external environment and promote knowledge sharing in virtual community. MethodsFirstly, based on the perspective of the platform environment, put forward relevant hypotheses about the influencing factors of knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination in virtual community, then design a questionnaire and conduct research, and finally test the hypotheses by using the method of structural equation model.Conclusion: community trust, community management, community motivation, community activity and information protection all have a significant positive impact on the knowledge-sharing behavior of community users. In terms of impact, community trust has the greatest impact on users' knowledge sharing behavior, followed by community management, and community activity has the least impact. Innovation/limitationsThis paper is an empirical study on the impact of knowledge sharing in virtual communities from the perspective of platform environment. The research perspective has a certain novelty. However, the data source of this paper is based on an online questionnaire survey, and there may be some data that are not objective and accurate.