Why Would You Save Your Files in a Group Folder?---Motivations for Information Sharing Through Digital Repositories in Project Groups

While knowledge management research is gaining in popularity in various disciplines such as organizational behavior, communication, and information science, insufficient attention has been paid to work group members' motivation to share information through digital repositories. The goal of this study is to understand various factors associated with information sharing through digital repositories in small groups. To meet this goal, this study integrates explanations from six social-psychological and communication theories into a streamlined model based on the Multi-theoretical Multi-level (MTML) framework (Monge & Contractor, 2003). Further, this study demonstrates that contextual factors in work groups may contribute to information sharing above and beyond individual level social-psychological factors. This study proposes a refined model (MTML 2.0) to advance the MTML based model by integrating four group contextual factors: trust, task interdependence, management expectation, and group norms.