1 Social Motives Polarity And Its Impact on Knowledge Sharing Farzad Sabetzadeh Department of Industrial and System Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University farzad.sabetzadeh@polyu.edu.hk Eric Tsui Department of Industrial and System Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University eric.tsui@polyu.edu.hk In a social knowledge cycle, knowledge generation, dissemination and absorption can be set on a platform like the internet. With the globally dispersed population over the web, it is important to know how knowledge can act in order to be accessed and reinforced by appropriate audiences through social collaboration. This paper attempts to pick up these cyclic strands with the focus on knowledge dissemination constituents. This research is based on the social perspective, taking into account the motives which describe some of the causes and rationales behind knowledge sharing behavior in social networks. It analyzes the motives which have higher levels of importance to social groups in sharing their knowledge and social tendencies under motivational uncertainty conditions. 1. Introduction The trend towards knowledge economies pushes both developed and developing countries towards an inevitable choice about the building blocks of knowledge societies. These are actually the knowledge workers, who share their knowledge and contribute the know-how of the knowledge-oriented industries. The Internet, as the fast growing platform for knowledge sharing, has had most consideration of all other changes in technology. While there have been studies on different motives affecting individuals from external factors (monetary reward systems, perks etc.) to internal factors (recognition, self-satisfaction etc.) that motivates them to contribute or disseminate knowledge within society, there has been a great challenge on how effective we can motivate communities of practice or the registered members of a knowledge sharing platform to share their knowledge with peers of their same group or society. The real fact is that the major part of the research done on the knowledge sharing topic hovers around the business communities of practice which consist of smaller groups in comparison with giant social networks that are accessible to any individual around the globe. What is actually sought after in this paper is to provide a general view on the motives that evoke people in a bigger scope to generate or disseminate knowledge on the biggest, most accessible knowledge pad known as the Internet. Motivating people to contribute their knowledge has been the main challenge, while the technology alone can only provide the online sharing tools (e.g. ERP Systems, Enterprise Portal, Web 2.0 etc.) Though there are so many motives, both extrinsic and intrinsic, that can