ABSTRACT:
Contribution behavior is described as voluntarily providing assistance or sharing knowledge when a colleague makes a request for assistance (Olivera, Goodman, and Tan 2008). The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors that lead to contribution behavior through collaboration technology. We engaged 183 participants over a collaboration platform to work on an accounting task and interrupted them with a request for help on a similar task. The participants could respond to the request using communication tools embedded in the collaboration application if they wanted to help. Post-experimental survey data were collected to measure the participants' motivations to contribute and analyze the quality of their contributions. The results indicate that participants are more motivated to contribute when they know the individual requesting assistance and have positive prior experience with the individual. Furthermore, having a higher level of domain knowledge in the area of the request and specificity of the request are associated with higher contribution quality. We discuss implications to accounting firms for providing an environment conducive to contribution behavior.
Data Availability: Data are available from the first author.
