UNDERSTANDING KNOWLEDGE-SHARING MOTIVATION, INCENTIVE MECHANISMS, AND SATISFACTION IN VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES CHIA-SHEN CHEN, SHIH-FENG CHANG, AND CHIH-HSING LIU National Taiwan University Virtual communities have gained popularity as a means for individuals to learn and share knowledge. However, knowledge-sharing motivation, incentive mechanisms, and satisfaction in these communities have not been examined in detail. Using survey data from 169 community members, we investigated the conditions under which motivation, incentive mechanisms, and satisfaction affect knowledge-sharing behavior. We found that the incentive mechanism is a significant predictor of a virtual community member’s motivation to obtain knowledge, and that the incentive mechanism and motivation do not positively affect a member’s satisfaction that causes him/her to engage willingly in knowledge sharing with others in virtual communities. Keywords: virtual community, knowledge-sharing motivation, incentive mechanisms, member satisfaction. Recently both business executives and academics have recognized knowledge sharing as a critical enabler for individuals to create value and sustain a competitive advantage in a rapidly changing environment (Abrams, Cross, Lesser, & Levin, 2003; Hu, Horng, & Sun, 2009). The most frequently mentioned strategy for bringing the human element into the knowledge-sharing process is the rapid growth of virtual communities of practice enabled by online networking interactions (Behrend & Erwee, 2009; Chiu, Hsu, & Wang, 2006) and this proliferation of virtual communities has attracted the interest of researchers and other practitioners (Hill & Terveen, 1996; Hiltz & Wellman, 1997). SOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND PERSONALITY, 2012, 40(4), 639-648 © Society for Personality Research http://dx.doi.org/10.2224/sbp.2012.40.4.639 639 Chia-Shen Chen, Shih-Feng Chang, and Chih-Hsing Liu, Graduate Institute of Business Administration, National Taiwan University. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Chih-Hsing Liu, Graduate Institute of Business Administration, National Taiwan University, Sec. 4, 1 Roosevelt Road, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC. Email: d96741003@ntu.edu.tw