Spanning Multiple Online Communities and Knowledge Contribution: The Cross-Level Moderating Effects of Environmental Scanning and Membership Fluidity

Many organizations facilitate a host of online knowledge sharing communities to assist internal knowledge sharing and operation. The permeable boundaries and voluntary structures of online communities allow individuals to span community boundaries and affect member resources and structures. Although much research has been done on members’ knowledge contribution in online communities, relatively little is known about how a member’s contribution to a community is shaped by the cross-level interactions of member’s external boundary spanning and the community’s environmental scanning or membership fluidity. Drawing from the theoretical lens of boundary spanning and the external view of online communities, we take a multi-level approach in the analysis of the activities of 1,992 members of 126 communities internal to a global company. We find that a member’s external boundary spanning activity (e.g., external knowledge acquisition via reading posts) has a positive effect, though at a decreasing rate, on subsequent internal knowledge contribution (e.g., posting replies in the member’s home community). This positive effect is stronger in communities that are more active in environmental scanning or have fluid membership and weaker in communities that are less active in environmental scanning or have stable membership.