# Physician professional motivation and online knowledge sharing for patient education: a perspective of motivation theory

## TL;DR

This study explores how doctors' professional motivation influences their online health knowledge sharing, and how factors like online experience and offline expertise affect this relationship.

## Contribution

The study introduces a new perspective on how professional motivation interacts with online and offline factors in influencing physicians' online knowledge sharing.

## Key findings

- Professional motivation increases the quantity and quality of online knowledge sharing by physicians.
- Online experience strengthens the positive impact of professional motivation on knowledge sharing.
- Offline expertise reduces the positive effect of professional motivation on knowledge-sharing quantity.

## Abstract

Drawing on motivation theory, this study aims to investigate the effect of professional motivation on online knowledge sharing for patient education with considering the contingencies of online experience and offline expertise.

Based on a panel dataset comprising 11,839 physicians with 24,389 physician-month observations selected from one of leading online health platforms in China, this study conducted the fixed hierarchical regression model to test the direct and moderating effects.

The results show that professional motivation positively affects online knowledge-sharing quantity and quality. Meanwhile, online experience enhances the positive effects of professional motivation on the above two dimensions of online knowledge sharing. In addition, offline expertise hinders the benefits of professional motivation to online knowledge-sharing quantity.

This study makes contributions to the literatures of motivation theory, online knowledge sharing, online and offline contexts on online health platforms, and provides implications for physicians and platform managers.