Can We Predict High Performing Leaders in Online Communities Based on Their Initial Activities?

Knowledge creation and sharing are fundamental practices in organizations and communities in the recent knowledge-intensive society. Online communities, which are enabled by recent technology advancements such as the Internet... [ view full abstract ]

Knowledge creation and sharing are fundamental practices in organizations and communities in the recent knowledge-intensive society. Online communities, which are enabled by recent technology advancements such as the Internet and digital media, have been often used to amplify knowledge creation and sharing. Although online communities have received much attention both in research and practice, their operating principles are not well understood; especially, little is known about how to predict who becomes a high performing leader (core member) in the online community. In this paper, we adopt the network perspective and examine whether we can predict online community leaders based on the ego and alters’ activities. By analyzing the Software Quality Assurance & Testing community in the Stack Exchange (online question and answer forum), this paper shows that we can predict who has the potential to become a high performing leader in the community based on user’s first month activities. The results demonstrate that both individual expertise and social relationship (communicative actions and interactions) are important to become online community leaders. The analysis also suggests that the path dependence of user’s activities can explain the dynamics of online community leadership. This study sheds light on an under-investigated prediction mechanism of online community leadership from the network perspective.