When to Signal? The Contextual Conditions for Career-Motivated User Contributions in Online Collaboration Communities
Files
Date
2021-01-05
Contributor
Advisor
Department
Instructor
Depositor
Speaker
Researcher
Consultant
Interviewer
Narrator
Transcriber
Annotator
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Volume
Number/Issue
Starting Page
316
Ending Page
Alternative Title
Abstract
This paper examines the contextual conditions for users’ career concern as a motivational driver of contributions in online collaboration communities. On the data of user-level activities from a computer programming-related online Q&A community (Stack Overflow), merged with job-market data for software-developer, we find robust evidence of a positive association between individual users’ career concern and their contributions. More important, we find that this positive relationship is further strengthened through the contextual conditions: the number of vacancies in the job market, the expected salaries from these jobs, and the transparency in the flow of career-related information within the community. We contribute to the literature on motivation in online collaboration communities. Our study thus offers insight into how career concern can be effectively utilized to motivate contributors in these communities. Our findings also foreshadow a possible paradigm change by characterizing online collaboration communities as institutions of career concern and skill signaling.
Description
Keywords
Collaboration in Online Communities: Information Processing and Decision Making, career concern, job-market signaling, motivation, online collaboration, online communities
Citation
Extent
10 pages
Format
Geographic Location
Time Period
Related To
Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Related To (URI)
Table of Contents
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Rights Holder
Local Contexts
Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.