The role of social capital and knowledge sharing in transformational leadership promoting value co-creation -A cross-level analysis

This study examines how transformational leadership influences value co-creation in virtual communities through various driving factors. Considering that participants of the same virtual community may experience a context effect resulting from perceived organizational consensus, this study employs a hierarchical linear model (HLM) for verification. This study proposes the following hypothesis: transformational leadership affects value co-creation by community members through social capital at the organizational level and knowledge sharing at the individual level. The results show that at the organizational level, transformational leadership positively affects social capital, which in turn positively affects value co-creation at the individual level. In addition, organizational-level transformational leadership positively influences knowledge sharing at the individual level, which in turn positively affects individual-level value co-creation. This study offers four contributions to the field of research: (a) contrary to previous studies that have emphasized commercial virtual communities, this study applies value co-creation to non-commercial virtual communities, investigating these communities to determine the source of innovation value, thereby advancing the exploration of value co-creation; (b) adopting the perspective of community leaders, this study compensates for the deficiencies of previous studies that adopted the perspective of customers; (c) concerning the overall framework, this study establishes organizational- and individual-level driving factors, investigating how transformational leadership influences value co-creation by community members; and (d) regarding methodology contribution, because virtual community composition exhibits nested characteristics, this study adopts the HLM for verification, increasing the accuracy of cross-level explanatory power that high-level explanatory variables possess for low-level dependent variables.