Compared to traditional organizations, online community leadership processes and how leaders emerge are not well studied. Previous studies of online leadership have often identified leaders as those who administer forums or have high network centrality scores. Although communication in online communities occurs almost exclusively through written words, little research has addressed how the comparative use of language shapes community dynamics. Using participant surveys to identify leading online community members, this study analyzes a year of communication network history and message content to assess whether language use differentiates leaders from other core community participants. We contribute a novel use of textual analysis to develop a model of language use to evaluate the utterances of all participants in the community. We find that beyond communication network positionÑin terms of formal role, centrality, membership in the core, and boundary spanningÑthose viewed as leaders by other participants, post a large number of positive, concise posts with simple language familiar to other participants. This research provides a model to study online language use and points to the emergent and shared nature of online community leadership.
Despite the growing importance of online communities in creating knowledge and facilitating collaboration, there has been limited research examining the role of leaders in such settings. In this paper, we propose a framework that integrates behavioral and structural approaches to explore the antecedents of leadership in online communities focused on knowledge work. Specifically, we propose that sociability and knowledge contribution behaviors as well as structural social capital lead to being identified as a leader by members of the online community. We test this framework using social network, survey, and message-level content analysis data collected from three different online communities focused on technical topics. The results from our zero inflated negative binomial models, with 6,709 messages from 976 individuals, provide strong support for the framework that is developed in this study. Our study contributes to both theory and practice by identifying the behavioral and structural antecedents of leadership in online communities.
Online communities bring together individuals with shared interest in joint action or sustained interaction. Power law distributions of user popularity appear ubiquitous in online communities but their formation mechanisms are not well understood. This study tests for the emergence of power law distributions via the mechanisms of preferential attachment, least efforts, direct reciprocity, and indirect reciprocity. Preferential attachment, where new entrants favor connections with already popular participants, is the predominant explanation suggested by prior literature. Yet, the attribution of preferential attachment or any other mechanism as a single unitary reason for the emergence of power law distributions runs contrary to the social nature of online communities and does not account for diversity of participants’ motivation. Agent-based modeling is used to test if a single social mechanism alone or multiple mechanisms together can generate power law distributions observed in online communities. Data from 28 online communities is used to calibrate, validate, and analyze the simulation. Simulated communication networks are randomly generated according to parameters for each hypothesis. The fit of the power law distribution in the model testing subset is then compared against the fit for these simulated networks. The major finding is that, in contrast to research in more general network settings, neither preferential attachment nor any other single mechanism alone generates a power law distribution. Instead, a blended model of preferential attachment with other social network formation mechanisms was most consistent with power law distributions seen in online communities. This suggests the need to move away from stylized explanations of network emergence that rely on single theories toward more highly socialized and multitheoretic explanations of community development.
Electronic networks of practice are computer-mediated discussion forums focused on problems of practice that enable individuals to exchange advice and ideas with others based on common interests. However, why individuals help strangers in these electronic networks is not well understood: there is no immediate benefit to the contributor, and free-riders are able to acquire the same knowledge as everyone else. To understand this paradox, we apply theories of collective action examine bow individual motivations and social capital influence knowledge contribution in electronic networks. This study reports on the activities of one electronic network supporting a professional legal association. Using archival, network, survey, and content analysis data, we empirically test model of knowledge contribution. We find that people contribute their knowledge when they perceive that it enhances their professional reputations, when they have the experience to share, and when they are structurally embedded in the network. Surprisingly, contributions occur without regard to expectations of reciprocity from others high levels of commitment to the network.
As software development projects continue to be over budget and behind schedule, researchers continue to look for ways to improve the likelihood of project success. In this research we juxtapose two different views of what influences software development team performance during the requirements development phase. In an examination of 66 teams from 15 companies we found that team skill, managerial involvement, and little variance in team experience enable more effective team processes than do software development tools and methods. Further, we found that development teams exhibit both positive and negative boundary-spanning behaviors. Team members promote and champion their projects to the outside environment, which is considered valuable by project stakeholders. They also, however, guard themselves from their environments; keeping important information a secret from stakeholders negatively predicts performance.