The paper addresses an important problem, i.e., identifying the factors that motivate or hinder employees from contributing their knowledge and expertise to online organizational repositories. Awareness of the factors that promote or hinder knowledge contribution can help organizations facilitate employee knowledge contribution for the benefit of the organization.

“The paper addresses an important problem i.e., identifying the factors that motivate or hinder employees from contributing their knowledge and expertise to online organizational repositories.”

This makes the paper useful for practitioners who manage or implement such repositories. For researchers, the paper provides a comprehensive model and survey instrument for explaining and predicting knowledge contribution behavior in electronic repositories.

The study develops a model for explaining knowledge contribution in online repositories. It is considered a new discovery since there were no existing models for explaining the phenomenon. Methodology-wise it provides a survey instrument for assessing individual costs and benefits of knowledge contribution as well as the social capital dimensions that may moderate the costs and benefits to influence individual’s contribution behavior. It builds on existing theories of social exchange and social capital and synthesizes them while applying them to the context of online knowledge contribution.

In layman’s terms, the paper is significant because it is the first study to develop and test a model to explain and predict knowledge contribution behavior in electronic repositories. Further, it incorporates both individual costs and benefits and organizational social capital dimensions in the model.

Since these repositories are deployed by the majority of organizations to leverage the knowledge resources or intellectual capital of the organization, the model is of use to organizations in order to promote usage of repositories for this purpose.

When I started this study for my Ph.D., knowledge management was an upcoming area of research with many challenging problems. One of the fundamental problems in this area was the dilemma involved in knowledge contribution where the organization wants employees to contribute their expertise to electronic repositories but employees may not feel inclined to do so due to the effort involved to codify their knowledge, the lack of incentives, or the loss of power due to revealing their unique knowledge.

Hence, I was motivated to tackle this problem along with my co-authors (my supervisors). Apart from the complexity of modeling such behavior, we also encountered challenges in operationalizing the model and data collection to validate the model. We had to gain access to organizational employees who would be able to record their perceptions for the study.

In a future characterized by volatile environments, effective leverage of organizational knowledge would be a factor differentiating the more successful from those less successful organizations. As a step toward facilitating knowledge leverage, knowledge contributions to electronic knowledge repositories need to be encouraged. As organizations invest more resources in knowledge management (KM) initiatives, it is imperative that research on KM initiatives and KM systems, such as our study, continue to generate findings that inform practice.