I'm Doing This For You (And Me!): Career Concern as Motivation in Online Collaboration Communities

Motivating individuals to contribute to online collaboration communities (OCCs) is challenging. In this paper, we build on the open source software (OSS) literature, which has identified career concern as an important source of motivation: software developers signal their qualities to potential employers by contributing to OSS projects. We examine if career concern can be an effective driver of contributions in OCCs as well, which are characteristically different from traditional OSS communities. Using an extensive data set from an online programming language-related questions and answers community, combined with detailed data from the software developer job market, and exploiting the launch of a career service platform in the community, we find strong evidence that job market demand influences contribution behavior. Specifically, we find that an increase in the demand for a programming language skill boosts the number of contributing members and the total quantity of contributions in that language domain. The members who are more specialized in particular programming languages exhibit greater responsiveness to demand changes. The introduction of the career service platform is associated with fewer but higher- quality contributions, suggesting that under a more transparent signaling environment, community members become more selective in providing contributions, trading off the volume for the quality of contribution. Our study contributes to the literature on motivation in OCCs by demonstrating career concern as an effective motivator of knowledge contribution. Our systematic use of large-scale archival data complements a number of prior studies that document evidence based on qualitative data. From a practical standpoint, our findings characterize OCCs as institutions that enable job seekers to signal their skills, thus offering novel insight on how OCCs can fruitfully mobilize the career concern of their members.