Understanding Motivations, Participation, and Performance of Electronic Knowledge Repository Contributors - A Longitudinal Study

A central element of knowledge management (KM) research and practice involves understanding employees' motivation to contribute to a corporate electronic knowledge repository (EKR). An increasing number of companies have reported disappointment in their investments in knowledge management due to the fact that employees are either not willing or not able to contribute their knowledge. Likewise, without employees' contribution, the EKR becomes ineffective as a business tool. Although existing KM research has identified factors that motivate employees to contribute to an EKR, less attention has been paid to understanding the degree to which these motivational factors are interrelated, and the extent to which they influence, and are influenced by, performance feedback given by other EKR users. Thus, practitioners are provided with little guidance as to the optimal portfolio of "motivators" that collectively lead to active EKR contributions. To address these important and under-explored research areas, this proposed study aims to reveal the following: (a) the extent of interrelationships among various motivations of employees who voluntarily contribute to an EKR; (b) the extent to which these motivations influence employee EKR contribution behavior, which in turn affect performance feedback as rated by EKR users; and (c) the extent to which past performance feedback has affected subsequent employees' motivation to contribute to an EKR.Drawing upon the psychology literature on extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, we develop a research model on the interrelationships between motivation, participation, and performance of corporate knowledge contributors. Specifically, the researchers argue that employees' motivations to contribute are not independent of one another, as implicitly assumed in existing KM literature; rather, they propose that they are interrelated in complex ways. The researchers also propose that different motivations have different impacts on employees’ participation in contributing to an EKR, which subsequently affects the performance of their contributing behavior. Finally, the researchers propose that past performance of contributing can enhance employees’ subsequent motivations to keep contributing to an EKR.In order to examine the proposed relationships, we plan to conduct a longitudinal study by collecting survey and archival data across multiple organizations that have deployed an EKR. The results obtained from this research will have significant theoretical and practical implications. They will contribute to the KM literature by examining the system of interrelationships between motivations, contributing behavior, and performance. Furthermore, this study may be among the first to investigate how past performance affects subsequent motivations to contribute, thus adding much needed insight into mechanisms of sustaining motivations to share knowledge. This study also attempts to contribute guidelines to the practical methods of motivating knowledge contribution behavior.