Understanding the motivations of customer knowledge sharing in online community

Today's advanced web-based technologies create expanded opportunities for collaboration and customer knowledge sharing. However, research on customer knowledge sharing in web-based communication remains new. This study aims at proposing a theoretical framework for understanding customer sharing behaviors, which we define as voluntary acts of contributions by providing information or sharing experiences, from a motivational perspective. Our focus is on why people are motivated to make contributions in online community where contributions occur primarily through internet and communication technologies. We apply Maslow's hierarchy of needs (the motivation theory) to explore how individual motivations influence customer knowledge sharing in online community. Particularly, customer knowledge sharing is modeled as a response to varied motivations. These motivations are proposed to be influenced by the availability of reputation systems. Given the importance of global knowledge sharing in today's world, we expect the research findings can be useful for outlining some generic guidelines for promoting customer knowledge sharing in online community.