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Assessing the impact of physicians' social capital on decision making quality mediated by knowledge sharing in a virtual community of practice: an empirical quantitative analysis
This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London.Purpose - Healthcare (HC) is a globally expensive investment, suffering from service quality, due
to medical errors caused by physicians’ poor decisions making (DM). Current published
literature: (1) encourages clinical DM research to reduce diagnostic errors and (2) stresses on the
dearth of means for practitioners’ knowledge shared DM; this research focuses on knowledge
sharing for improving medical DM quality through physicians’ social capital (SC) in a virtual
community of practice (VCoP). Physicians join a virtual community (VC) to share clinical
practice knowledge to aid medical DM. This study aims to assess the effect of physicians’ SC on
medical DM and assess the mediating role of knowledge sharing quality, between physicians’ SC
and medical DM quality since research lacks to investigate the impact of knowledge management
(KM) tools in a HC context. VCoP is a KM tool and medical DM quality is a HC topic of this
study. Design/methodology/approach – This positivist, quantitative research utilizes non-experimental
survey to empirically assess its conceptual framework. After attaining an ethical approval, from
Brunel Business School Research Ethics Committee, online survey was pre-tested and pilot tested
for clarity and validity. 10 non-physician Ph.D. academics voluntarily participated during the
survey’s pre-test phase. The survey was amendment for its pilot study phase; conducted in
“plastic surgery yahoo group” VC. 31 physician VC members voluntarily participated. Again,
the survey was amended and distributed for main data collection from 204 voluntary
SurveyMonkey’s VC’s physician members. Findings – Data was analysed using SPSS 20 and LISREL 8.80 by means of confirmatory factor analysis and Structural Equation Modeling. Empirical findings supported this study’s four main hypotheses as well as supported this study’s initially proposed conceptual framework.
Originality/value – This study customized the Honeycomb framework to establish a definition of
professional physicians; HC VCs followed by identifying 51 VCs from social networking
platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. This study also fulfilled its aim and hence proposed a
structurally fit conceptual framework.
Keywords –Virtual Community of Practice; Healthcare Knowledge Management; Confirmatory
Factor Analysis; Structural Equation Modelin
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