The Impact of Community Commitment on Participation in Online Communities.

Author List: Bateman, Patrick J.; Gray, Peter H.; Butler, Brian S.;
Information Systems Research, 2011, Volume 22, Issue 4, Page 841-854.
Online discussion communities have become a widely used medium for interaction, enabling conversations across a broad range of topics and contexts. Their success, however, depends on participants' willingness to invest their time and attention in the absence of formal role and control structures. Why, then, would individuals choose to return repeatedly to a particular community and engage in the various behaviors that are necessary to keep conversation within the community going? Some studies of online communities argue that individuals are driven by self-interest, while others emphasize more altruistic motivations. To get beyond these inconsistent explanations, we offer a model that brings dissimilar rationales into a single conceptual framework and shows the validity of each rationale in explaining different online behaviors. Drawing on typologies of organizational commitment, we argue that members may have psychological bonds to a particular online community based on (a) need, (b) affect, and/or (c) obligation. We develop hypotheses that explain how each form of commitment to a community affects the likelihood that a member will engage in particular behaviors (reading threads, posting replies, moderating the discussion). Our results indicate that each form of community commitment has a unique impact on each behavior, with need-based commitment predicting thread reading, affect-based commitment predicting reply posting and moderating behaviors, and obligation-based commitment predicting only moderating behavior. Researchers seeking to understand how discussion-based communities function will benefit from this more precise theorizing of how each form of member commitment relates to different kinds of online behaviors. Community managers who seek to encourage particular behaviors may use our results to target the underlying form of commitment most likely to encourage the activities they wish to promote.
Keywords: commitment; discussion groups; online behavior; online communities; social media; social technologies; virtual communities; Web 2.0
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#45 0.265 community communities online members participants wikipedia social member knowledge content discussion collaboration attachment communication law virtual membership structures forms activities
#227 0.142 commitment need practitioners studies potential role consider difficult models result importance influence researchers established conduct investigated establishing appear clearly determining
#75 0.139 behavior behaviors behavioral study individuals affect model outcomes psychological individual responses negative influence explain hypotheses expected theories consequences impact theory
#125 0.088 framework model used conceptual proposed given particular general concept frameworks literature developed develop providing paper developing guidelines concepts appropriate set
#173 0.087 effect impact affect results positive effects direct findings influence important positively model data suggest test factors negative affects significant relationship
#10 0.076 strategies strategy based effort paper different findings approach suggest useful choice specific attributes explain effective affect employ particular online control
#236 0.062 form items item sensitive forms variety rates contexts fast coefficients meaning higher robust scores hardware providing compared single complete subgroups
#193 0.061 time use size second appears form larger benefits combined studies reasons selected underlying appear various significantly result include make attention