Sustained Participation in Virtual Communities from a Self-Determination Perspective

Zhang Zhang

doi:10.3390/su11236547

Abstract

Customers’ participation and contribution are vital to the sustainability of virtual communities (VCs) platform while people have many options to freely surf on the Internet. Sustained participation, instead of initial participation, is more meaningful to virtual communities’ sustained development. From the perspective of self-determination theory, this paper explores the effect of community artifacts on sustained participations through users’ satisfaction of psychological need and virtual community identification. With empirical studies in two types of virtual community platforms (interest-based and relational-based), our results reveal several important findings. Firstly, this study finds that virtual co-presence and deep profiling can increase users’ satisfaction of inner psychological needs. But the use of persistent labeling does not affect the user’s satisfaction of psychological needs. In addition, self-presentation is positively related to relational-based community, and rather has no impact on interest-based community. Secondly, this study finds that there exists a positive relationship between users’ satisfied psychological needs and virtual community identification. Finally, virtual community identification significantly impacts sustained participation. This paper offers a new perspective on the psychological mechanism of sustained participation and yields important implications for the managerial practice.

Highlights

The issue of user participation in virtual community platforms is receiving increasing attention from business practitioners and academics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
This study argues that the self-determination theory (SDT) provides a theoretical framework to comprehend the psychological mechanisms related to the sustained participation behaviors of virtual community members
This study explores the psychological mechanisms of virtual community members and their sustained participation behaviors behind the users’ perceived effectiveness of community artifacts in virtual communities from the perspective of the self-determination theory

Summary

Introduction

The issue of user participation in virtual community platforms is receiving increasing attention from business practitioners and academics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Active participation of virtual community members is considered to be the core of sustainability of the community and has been identified as an important measure for online community performance [8]. A key to successfully carry out online customer community in today’s era is in motivating and maintaining virtual community members to continuously become actively involved in the long-term [9,10,11]. Some of the management scholars have researched VC participation behavior through a motivation or identification theory perspective [9,12,13,14] these studies do not distinguish the pattern of participation in virtual communities. The sustained participation behavior from the perspective of the psychological mechanism has even more theoretical and practical value for researchers and practitioners [10,15]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion