The Role of We-Intention and Self-Motivation in Social Collaboration: Knowledge Sharing in the Digital World

Abstract

Governments throughout the world have set social distancing guidelines to manage COVID-19 that reduced opportunities for maintaining social connections through face-to-face interactions. For this study, we conceptualized social collaboration as an intentional social activity in which people are willing to share their knowledge, experience, and expertise. We examined the relative impacts of we-intention (WI), moral trust (MT), and self-motivation (SM) on participation in social collaboration (PSC) and knowledge sharing (KS). We distributed a questionnaire-based survey to a group of Nepalese residents who actively participated in, commented on, and posted questions on social networking sites and received a total of 239 valid questionnaires for analysis. We tested and verified the research model and variables in SPSS 20 to investigate how PSC accelerates KS intention at digital platforms. The standardized path coefficient for PSM to KS was 0.75, suggesting that social collaborator’s participation has a strong positive effect on KS purpose. The standardized path coefficients for WI to MT, WI to PSC, WI to SM, MT to PSC, and SM to PSC were 0.55, 0.72, 0.49, 0.42, and 0.67, respectively. All of the values supported the hypothesis and were significant at p ≤ 0.001.