improving knowledge exchange among employees, particularly
in distributed work environments. However, even as
many organizations implement ESM platforms in their
communication infrastructure, they continue to struggle to
establish fully active ENoP (O’Dell and Hubert 2011).
Consequently, we need a deeper understanding of the microfoundations
of user behavior in ENoP.
1264 MIS Quarterly Vol. 38 No. 4/December 2014
Beck et al./Knowledge Exchange & Symbolic Action in Electronic Networks of Practice
To capture social antecedents of knowledge exchange in
ENoP, we conceptualized and empirically tested a multilevel
model of the characteristics of knowledge seekers, knowledge
contributors, and the relationship between them. In contrast
to prior findings, our empirical results reject the notion that
effective knowledge exchange in ENoP depends solely on the
knowledge contributor. Rather, we found that knowledge
seekers’ characteristics and relational factors are crucial in
driving knowledge exchanges in ESM-enabled ENoP. Therefore,
our results augment and extend prior research in an
important information systems field-namely, computermediated
knowledge exchange and collaboration in distributed
work environments. The rapid growth of ESM has not
gone unnoticed by communication or IS scholars, yet most
prior work relies on student populations or considers an
advertising or marketing context rather than focusing on ESM
that establish ENoP in a professional context. This study
contributes to theory and practice by focusing on intraorganizational
knowledge exchange as an important organizational
capability. Our results deepen our understanding of
the interrelated multilevel antecedents of knowledge exchange
in ENoP from a pragmatic point of view.