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Journal article
When to Signal? Contingencies for Career-Motivated Contributions in Online Collaboration Communities
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS, v 23(6), p1386
2022
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Online collaboration communities are increasingly taking on new roles beyond knowledge creation and exchange, especially the role of a skill-signaling channel for career-motivated community members. This paper examines the contingency effects of job-market conditions for career-motivated knowledge contributions in online collaboration communities. From the data of individual-level activities in a computer programming-related online Q&A community (Stack Overflow), merged with job-market data for software developers, we find robust evidence of a positive association between community members' career motivations and their knowledge contributions. More importantly, we find that this positive relationship is strengthened by job-market conditions: the number of vacancies in the job market, the expected salaries from these jobs, and the transparency in the flow of careerrelated information between the community and external recruiters. We contribute to the motivation literature in online collaboration communities by identifying and substantiating the role of contextual factors in mobilizing members' career motivation. Our study thus offers novel insight into how career motivation can be effectively utilized to motivate contributors in these communities. Our findings also point to a possible paradigm change by characterizing online collaboration communities as emerging institutions for career motivation and skill signaling.
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Details
- Title
- When to Signal? Contingencies for Career-Motivated Contributions in Online Collaboration Communities
- Publication Details
- JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS, v 23(6), p1386
- Publisher
- ASSOC INFORMATION SYSTEMS; ATLANTA
- Grant note
- Authors are in alphabetical order-all authors are first authors and contributed equally. We thank John Grant from IT Jobs Watch for providing us with the job market data. We also thank the anonymous reviewers and the senior editor, Giri Tayi, for their valuable feedback. We are also grateful to the organizers and reviewers of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2017 where an earlier version of this paper received the Best Paper Award in the CTO (OCIS) division. The research of Hyunwoo Park was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. NRF-2022R1C1C1011888).
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Drexel University
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001132912900004
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85137352474
- Other Identifier
- 991021861187304721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Computer Science, Information Systems
- Information Science & Library Science