From Physical to Digital: Investigating the Offline Drivers of the Online Use and Quality of Knowledge Exchange of an Intraorganizational Digital Collaborative Technology

This article integrates social capital and social cognitive theories to empirically test the effects of employees’ attitudes, normative expectations, and informal position targeting the organization as offline drivers of online digital platform use and quality of knowledge exchange. Our findings provide several contributions: 1) revealing the relationships between individual and contextual variables targeting the physical and virtual organizational contexts, 2) offering a nuanced understanding of offline drivers for digital platform use and knowledge exchange, and 3) identifying key predictors that managers can leverage to align employee behaviors with organizational goals. This article underlines the need to pay attention to individual motivations to use and contribute to intraorganizational digital platforms as a function of the position that individuals hold within the informal organizational network. Results also suggest that managers should focus on the development of internalized norms related to learning and sharing behaviors as well as to the outcome expectations related to digital platforms as positive motivational drivers of their use and quality of contributions.