Usage of Online Knowledge Repositories: A Comparison of Two Governance Mechanisms

Two governance mechanisms employed by organizations to improve the perceptions and usage of their online knowledge repositories among knowledge workers are employing experts to control or edit users’ contributions (refereed repositories), and allowing a community of users to review, rate, or edit existing contributions (community wikis). Although these mechanisms are purported to improve the quality of knowledge assets, actual usage of online knowledge repositories still tend to vary widely among organizational employees. The goals of this paper are to understand how the above governance mechanisms influence and/or moderate knowledge repository usage patterns within organizations. To that end, we employ the elaboration-likelihood model from the social psychology literature to derive twelve hypotheses formalizing the main and moderation effects related to organizational knowledge repository usage. An online field experiment is proposed to test these hypotheses. Data collection is in progress, and the final results will be presented at the conference.