The Role of We-Intention and Self-Motivation in Social Collaboration: Knowledge Sharing in the Digital World

Darshana Karna,Ilsang Ko

doi:10.3390/su14042042

Abstract

Governments throughout the world have set social distancing guidelines to manage COVID-19 that reduced opportunities for maintaining social connections through face-to-face interactions. For this study, we conceptualized social collaboration as an intentional social activity in which people are willing to share their knowledge, experience, and expertise. We examined the relative impacts of we-intention (WI), moral trust (MT), and self-motivation (SM) on participation in social collaboration (PSC) and knowledge sharing (KS). We distributed a questionnaire-based survey to a group of Nepalese residents who actively participated in, commented on, and posted questions on social networking sites and received a total of 239 valid questionnaires for analysis. We tested and verified the research model and variables in SPSS 20 to investigate how PSC accelerates KS intention at digital platforms. The standardized path coefficient for PSM to KS was 0.75, suggesting that social collaborator’s participation has a strong positive effect on KS purpose. The standardized path coefficients for WI to MT, WI to PSC, WI to SM, MT to PSC, and SM to PSC were 0.55, 0.72, 0.49, 0.42, and 0.67, respectively. All of the values supported the hypothesis and were significant at p ≤ 0.001.

Highlights

COVID-19 affected billions of people around the globe, with significant impacts on health, economic, and social domains
We investigated how participation in social collaboration accelerates knowledge sharing on digital platforms
Social collaboration keeps people at the center of computing and ensures that individuals connect with the right people and information, and this did not change in academia

Summary

Introduction

COVID-19 affected billions of people around the globe, with significant impacts on health, economic, and social domains. Governments worldwide established guidelines for social distancing, quarantine lockdowns, and working from home to contain the global disease outbreak, and the restrictions for social gathering varied between countries, government policies often involved closing schools and universities, nonessential physical shops, and businesses, as well as limiting public transportation and facilities and all social gatherings. Under these governmental regulations and policies, public face-to-face interaction has decreased significantly, and with limited opportunities to meet in person, people have been using digital platforms to remain socially connected.

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