Developing a Scale to Measure Knowledge Sharing Behaviours

It is vital to understand why people participate in knowledge sharing processes in virtual community of practices (VCoPs) to encourage knowledge sharing behaviours (KBSs) of community members. Till now, no effort has been put into developing a valid and reliable measure of KSB in Turkish culture. The primary purpose of this study is to develop a new measure of KSB. We used a combination of literature review and semi-structured interviews with 19 community members to develop an item pool. Qualitative analysis of the interview data showed that factors affecting KSB are twofold: contextual and personal factors. The validity and reliability studies of the scale were conducted on 300 members of VCoPs. The KSB scale developed in this study is a five-dimensional, twenty-one-item, five-response choice frequency scale. The scale includes “enjoy helping”, “respect”, “usefulness/relevancy”, “trust” and “altruism” dimensions.