Faraj, Samer, Srinivas Kudaravalli, and Molly Wasko. "Leading collaboration in online communities." MIS quarterly 39.2 (2015): 393-412.

This paper addresses the limited research on leadership within online communities dedicated to knowledge work, despite their growing significance in knowledge creation and collaboration. The study proposes a comprehensive framework integrating behavioral and structural approaches to examine the factors influencing leadership in these online communities. The framework suggests that sociability, knowledge contribution behaviors, and structural social capital contribute to the identification of leaders by community members. The proposed model is tested using data from three distinct online communities focused on technical topics, utilizing social network analysis, surveys, and message-level content analysis. The results, based on 6,709 messages from 976 individuals, strongly support the developed framework. The study makes a significant contribution to both theory and practice by identifying key behavioral and structural factors influencing leadership emergence in online communities.