What drives continued knowledge sharing? An investigation of knowledge-contribution and -seeking beliefs

Knowledge management (KM) research has yielded extensive explanations regarding the individual's motivation to share knowledge, each with different sets of factors. Yet the study of continued knowledge sharing is rare. There has been little research investigating this issue from contributing and seeking perspectives-the two distinct, but closely interrelated, facets of continued knowledge sharing. We propose that knowledge management system (KMS) users' beliefs are contextually differentiated, and thus a distinction between knowledge-contribution and knowledge-seeking behaviors and an adequate emphasis on their variance in terms of user belief is needed. By incorporating the knowledge-contribution and knowledge-seeking perspectives in a single study, we model and examine the differences among driving factors in two behavioral contexts, provide the conceptual comparisons and preliminary discussions, and thus advance our understanding of continued knowledge sharing via the KMS. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.