Silence Is Golden: Lurking Behaviour Within an Online Community and the Success of Micro Business in the Context of Developing Country

Abstract

Online community is an efficient and effective means for entrepreneurs to obtain business knowledge. Existing literature has been focussing on the importance of knowledge posting behaviour, while the role of knowledge lurking behaviour-collecting and propagating information-is neglected although lurkers represent the majority of online community members. Two studies, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, were conducted examine the benefit of lurking behaviour in promoting entrepreneurial self-efficacy and subsequently the business performance given the individual’s level of digital literacy. An online survey was conducted to 158 Indonesian micro business entrepreneurs obtained from the database owned by an entrepreneurship unit of a public university in Indonesia to empirically test the hypothesis. The results of PLS-SEM analysis empirically demonstrated that lurking behaviour increases business performance when the entrepreneurs gain entrepreneurial self-efficacy from lurking and so are more confidence in their capacity to manage the business regardless the level of digital literacy. A Critical Incident Technique (CIT) was administered to 122 micro business entrepreneurs in Study 2, exploring their lurking experiences, confirming and explaining the results of Study 1. Lurking behaviour is found to be an important means to improve their competence in increasing consumers’ values through the acquisition of marketing and general business strategies.