Motivation and Innovation in Online Collaborative Community: An Application of Expectancy Theory

Nowadays, innovation is increasingly important for firms to build and/or sustain their competitive advantages, and thus they seek outside innovators to help them solve innovation problems. Online collaborative community, which can combine diverse intelligence across geographic borders and promote collaborative innovation effectively and efficiently, has been adopted by many leading companies in the past few years. As a new form of organization, however, collaborative community lacks theoretical guidance, especially in the community members’ motivation and its relationship with innovation performance. This study leverages expectancy theory to examine why community members (i.e. innovators) commit their efforts to collaborative projects, how their efforts influence innovation performance, and how this influence is moderated by their ability. Overall, this study suggests that practitioners manage their collaborative community through improving perceived valence and expectancy and that researchers further decompose, extend, or examine our conceptual model.