Employees' knowledge searching in professional virtual forums and in teams: A complement or substitute?

Abstract This paper investigates the complementary or substitute relationship between knowledge searching in teams and in professional virtual forums (PVFs) will depend on the motivations of knowledge searching. We select creative thinking as an intrinsic motivation of knowledge searching in teams and expertise identification as an extrinsic motivation of employees' knowledge searching in teams in order to do creative work. Using the sample of 201 professional employees in Chinese stock service companies, our results demonstrate that when employees are driven by creative thinking, their searching knowledge in PVFs will decrease their searching in teams, which is a substitute effect. When employees are driven by expertise identification, employees' searching knowledge in PVFs will not influence their searching in teams. These findings extend extant knowledge searching and creativity literature by taking employees' knowledge searching motivation and knowledge searching in PVFs into the consideration. Theoretical and practical suggestions are discussed.