Knowledge contribution is critical to the success of Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives. While extensive research has been done to understand how different individual and organizational factors affect knowledge contribution behavior, few have studied the mediating mechanisms affecting the contribution act. This study develops and empirically validates a model of how people contribute their knowledge in the distributed team environment. Particularly, we explore two mediating mechanisms of awareness and effort required in searching and matching. Our results indicate that the mediating mechanisms model provides a better specification of the antecedents of contribution behavior. Our findings and implications are discussed in the paper
