How does cultural confidence awaken community citizenship behaviors? The moderating effect of cultural involvement

Abstract

We state that investigating the impact of residents' cultural confidence on their affections and behaviors is worthy of exploration for heritage destinations. Using 666 residents of Quanzhou, a UNESCO World Heritage site, as examples, we employed the SEM technique to investigate how cultural confidence influences community citizenship behavior. As a consequence, not only residents' cultural confidence is positively associated with their affections (i.e., place identity and psychological ownership), but it is also positively associated with their citizenship behaviors (i.e., community citizenship behavior, including recommendation behavior, helping behavior, and feedback behavior). However, we found that cultural involvement would not enhance the positive effect of cultural confidence on place identity. As such, we argue that this study makes contributions by highlighting the importance of cultural confidence in cultural tourism, revealing the unique role of excessive cultural involvement, and providing valuable insights from the perspective of residents. Furthermore, we believe that, given the current competitive conditions in the tourism industry, providing new insights to better understand the roles of residents' cultural confidence and involvement would be critical to the success of heritage tourism.