The role of cognitive conflict in open-content collaboration

IS research on participant’s motivation 1 in Knowledge Management System have paid relatively limited attention to the effect of diversifying the technological artifacts while they focused more on identifying the generic motivational factors that apply across the varying contexts. However, the manifest success of disruptive collaboration system outside of the corporate boundaries such as Wikipedia calls for our extended attention to the motivational factors that may not be emergent without the provision of context and artifacts that challenge the assumptions made by KMS within the organizational setting. Through the online survey of 100 Wikipedians, this study evaluates the effect of one novel construct (i.e., socio-cognitive conflict) proposed by Cress and Kimmerle (2008) as an example of such emergent motivation made explicit by maneuvering specific design of collaboration system which otherwise would remain immaterial. In parallel, the analysis also explores the generic motivational constructs the effects of which have been extensively studied within organizational contexts but not sufficiently examined outside of such boundaries.