Accessing External Knowledge: Intention of Knowledge Exchange in Virtual Community of Practice

As the competition between firms increases rapidly, it is critical to innovate continuously. Accessing external knowledge is essential to have continuous innovative products. This paper focuses on the virtual community of practice (VCoP), is a type of community of practice but exists virtually for acquiring and sharing external knowledge. To find out users'' intentions of using VCoP, this papr adopts TRA(Theory of Reasoned Action) and also categorizes two attitude: Knowledge sharing and knowledge acquiring. 105 VCoP users responded through email-based survey. The results shows that reciprocal relationships, sense of self-worth, job relevance, and perceived content quality have a positive influence on attitudes toward knowledge exchange. However, perceived system quality has no significant impact.