A study of Facebook Groups membersa knowledge sharing

There have been many studies focusing on individualsa knowledge sharing behavior in the organizational setting. With the rapid prevalence of social networking sites, many people began to express their thoughts or share their knowledge via Facebook website. Facebook is an open environment which does not provide any immediate monetary benefits to its users. Its Groups membersa knowledge sharing behavior could be different from the ones in organizations. We proposed a research model to examine factors which promote the Facebook Groups usersa willingness to share knowledge. The factors in the study include extrinsic motivation, social and psychological forces, and social networking sharing culture. We used PLS to test our proposed hypotheses based on 271 responses collected through an online survey. Our results indicated that reputation would affect knowledge sharing attitude of Groups members and sense of self-worth would directly and indirectly (through subjective norm) affect the attitude. In addition, social networking sharing culture (fairness, identification, and openness) is the most significant factor, not only directly affecting knowledge sharing intention, but also indirectly influencing the sharing intention through subjective norm and knowledge sharing attitude.