Retirees' Knowledge Contribution in Virtual Communities: A Research from Social Cognitive Theory Perspective

Abstract

Abstract:

Retirees are increasingly engaging in information and knowledge sharing activities in virtual communities, but prior studies mainly focus onyoung people or employees. It isn't appropriate to explain retirees' knowledge sharing behavior using the data based on young people or employees. Based on social cognitive theory, this paper identifies the potential environmental and cognitive factors, and treats other members' participation in a virtual community as environmental factor, self-efficacy and outcome expectation as cognitive factors, analyzing their effects on a focal retiree's knowledge contribution behavior in the same virtual community. The empirical results show that these three factors not only affect a focal retiree's knowledge contribution behavior directly; furthermore, the two cognitive factors have a moderating effect on the environmental factor's effect. This paper verifies two contradictory effects: self-efficacy's substitutive effect and outcome expectation's complementary effect, which is less mentioned in prior researches; moreover, those findings also shed light on developing senior human resource and encouraging active aging for retirees.

Key words: knowledge contribution, virtual community, senior citizen, retiree, active aging

Zhou Junjie. Retirees' Knowledge Contribution in Virtual Communities: A Research from Social Cognitive Theory Perspective[J]. , 2016, 28(2): 84-92.

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