The Effect of Virtual Community Culture and Group Cohesion on Knowledge Sharing: A Case Study of Professional Virtual Community

With the rapid development of internet, virtual community has become the most import knowledge sharing platform. And this study investigates the inter-relationships among virtual community culture, group cohesion and knowledge sharing. Based on 185 questionnaires from Chinese netizens in professional virtual community, this paper implements a structural equation model to test the research framework and hypotheses. The results show that virtual community culture has direct positive impact on group cohesion but no direct positive impact on knowledge sharing. In addition, group cohesion plays an intermediary role between virtual community culture and knowledge sharing, and has direct positive impact on knowledge sharing, which indicates that group cohesion is very important to Chinese netizens for knowledge sharing activity under the rapid changed environment of knowledge economy.