Sharing knowledge, gaining business: value implications of social status in online knowledge communities

Purpose Online knowledge communities in which business managers and professionals across organizations share professional knowledge for peer support are common on social media but sparsely examined in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Drawing on status theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic value of managers’ status in online knowledge communities, conferred from their professional knowledge sharing. The boundary conditions for this economic value are further analyzed under the guidance of transaction cost theory. Design/methodology/approach A panel data set of 12,007 e-businesses on 1688.com, a well-known B2B online marketplace in China, and their managers in the affiliated online knowledge community (club.1688.com) was collected to empirically validity of the hypotheses. Findings Managers’ status in the online knowledge community contributes to their e-store performance in the online B2B marketplace. In addition, e-businesses with high asset specificity, transaction uncertainty and transaction frequency benefit more from their managers’ status conferred from professional knowledge sharing. Originality/value This research contributes to online community and social commerce research by studying the conditional values of participating in online communities. This study also extends the applicability of status theory and transaction cost theory to the context of online B2B social commerce and provides new perspectives and insights in synthesizing these two theories to explain the value implication of online knowledge communities. Practically this research highlights the value and importance of professional knowledge sharing, in addition to the commonly studied customer-oriented content sharing, on social media and offers B2B managers guidance to optimize their e-business performance.