Motives for sharing knowledge

In this questionnaire 15 items are divided over four different motives for sharing knowledge on a knowledge community platform, namely information, social interaction, personal identity and entertainment. The initial reliability measurement resulted in three of the four Cronbach’s Alpha values below 0.70. Cronbach's alphas for the four information items, four social interaction and the four items of personal identity were .66 and .67 and .69, respectively. Only the 3 items of entertainment had a Cronbach’s alpha above .70 (α = .72). It was therefore decided to perform an exploratory factor analysis using a Maximum Likelihood Estimation (N = 223). The key of this investigation is to check whether the 15 items that should measure the four motives, actually load those four motives. The results of this analysis are shown in table 13.

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Table 13 Factor analysis motives to share knowledge on a knowledge community platform

Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Factor 4 Personal identity Social interaction Information Entertainment om er bij te horen. ,764

om mijn status/aanzien te vergroten. ,722 om het gevoel te krijgen dat ik deel

uitmaak van een (kennis)netwerk.

,685 om te laten zien wie ik ben. ,562 omdat ik druk voel om deel te

nemen.

,551 om in contact te komen/blijven met

andere professionals. ,758 om (collegiale) ondersteuning te krijgen. ,634 om interessante mensen te ontmoeten. ,519

om gratis informatie te verkrijgen. ,756

om te kijken naar wat er te vinden is. ,747

om naar informatie te zoeken. ,642

om up-to-date te blijven. ,496

omdat het vermakelijk is. ,852

omdat ik het gewoon leuk vind. ,656

omdat het mij ontspant. ,648

Eigenvalue 4,575 2,092 1,213 1,122 There is one item that was initially placed in the social interaction construct. But from this analysis it becomes clear that this items correlates more with the items of personal identity. Hence it is chosen to rearrange the items, moving the specific item from the social interaction to the personal identity construct. This resulted in an improvement of one Cronbach’s alpha, namely personal identity (α = .74). Which means that two of the four constructs can now be seen as reliable. Fortunately, there were some additional items added to the questionnaire regarding motives to share knowledge on a knowledge community platform. Those additional items were slightly more work-related. Adding these items to the 15 previously mentioned items makes a total of 21 motive items. Once more it was decided to perform an exploratory factor analysis using a Maximum Likelihood Estimation (N = 223) with orthogonal rotation (varimax). The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was used and yielded .83, which is well above the acceptable limit (.50). Bartlett’s test of Sphericity (χ2 (210) = 1554.42, p<.000) indicated that the data are significant and suitable for using principal component analysis. Four components had eigenvalues exceeding 1 and together they are capable of explaining roughly 54.4 % of all the variable variances. The first factor consists mainly of items that are work related. The second factor consists of a combination of items focusing on information and items about getting in touch with others. The third is about personal identity, but in a kind of a

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knowledge sharing community or network. The last one is exactly the same as before, focused on knowledge sharing as a form of entertainment. From this, my suggestions for the names of the motive factors are: work optimization, information and conversation, personal network identity and entertainment. These names will be used in the rest of the results as the motives to share knowledge on a knowledge community platform (see table 14).

Table 14 Factor analysis of all motives to share knowledge on a knowledge community platform

Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Factor 4 work optimization information and conversation personal network identity entertainment om (collegiale) ondersteuning te krijgen. .717 om een bericht te plaatsen over iets

waar ik in mijn werk tegen aanloop.

.697 om praktijkvoorbeelden (casuïstiek)

te delen.

.673 om een expert te kunnen consulteren. .658 om mijn werk beter te kunnen doen. .382 om te weten wat er te doen is in de

regio qua conferenties.

.725 om te weten welke trainingen en/of

bijscholing er wordt gegeven in de regio.

.637

om up-to-date te blijven. .636

om te kijken naar wat er te vinden is. .600 om in contact te komen/blijven met

andere professionals.

.509

om gratis informatie te verkrijgen. .435

om interessante mensen te ontmoeten..

.383

om naar informatie te zoeken. .380

om mijn status/aanzien te vergroten. .736

om het gevoel te krijgen dat ik deel uitmaak van een (kennis)netwerk.

.671

om te laten zien wie ik ben. .580

om er bij te horen. .577

omdat ik druk voel om deel te nemen. .294

omdat het vermakelijk is. .720

omdat het mij ontspant. .547

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Eigenvalue 5.760 2,635 1.794 1,231 In order to understand the different motives and what they entail during this study, a short description of the motives will be given. Work optimization is the motive to share knowledge to optimize your own tasks and work or to get work related support. Information and conversation is a motive to share knowledge to get information or to get in touch with others outside of your “normal” network. Personal network identity is the motive to share knowledge to gain some sort of reputation or respect from others in the network, building your personal identity in the network. The last motive, entertainment, is to share knowledge for enjoyment or to pass some time.