Knowledge adoption in online communities of practice

Abstract

Although researchers and practitioners have recognized that online Communities of Practice (COPs) can be valuable tools for knowledge management, there is little quantitative research about this relatively new phenomenon. This dissertation helps fill the gap by investigating how individual members of text-based, asynchronous online COPs adopt knowledge contributed by others for their own problem solving. For this purpose, this dissertation methodologically utilizes dual-process theories of information processing. It first verifies the appropriateness of the theories by replicating previous research in the new domain. Then, the behaviors and effects of factors that are not previously researched in this way, yet especially pertain to online COPs, are investigated. It is hypothesized that genre conformity and information consistency operate as two heuristic cues in the knowledge adoption in online COPs. It is also hypothesized that focused search and the presence of disconfirming information increase elaboration likelihood during dual-process knowledge adoption. These hypotheses were tested and partially supported with survey data collected from members of two online COPs with different characteristics. This dissertation contributes to both IS research and the dual-process theories. Contrary to the cue-filtering paradigm of previous media research, it expands the computer-mediated communication (CMC) literature by identifying additional cues that are utilized for CMC-based knowledge adoption. It invokes the notion that the CMC context plays a dynamic role in ongoing knowledge adoption processes, both through elaboration likelihood and through interactions between the dual processes. Moreover, it advances the situated view of knowledge adoption by demonstrating that how members search for information and how current information compares to prior knowledge matter in online COPs. Focusing on the pull technology of online COPS, it offers another theoretical link between CMC technologies and knowledge management. Practically, this dissertation provides us with new insights into the utilization of online COPs for improving organizational knowledge management. It also suggests new directions for designing software systems to better support knowledge sharing in online COPs.