When Self-Disclosure Promotes the Psychological Ownership of Virtual Communities: The Role of Self-Uncertainty.

How do virtual community members develop psychological ownership and what are the effects of psychological ownership in virtual communities?

The Role of Network Embeddedness and Psychological Ownership in Consumer Responses to Brand Transgressions

PurposePsychological ownership has been a topic of intense debate for several decades, especially in the digital era. In addition, as part of the digital public domain, virtual communities shape our digital lives. Unfortunately, few studies have examined the communication process in virtual communities from the perspective of psychological ownership. Moreover, information and organization are key aspects of virtual communities. This research aimed to explore the impact of psychological ownership on communication satisfaction from these two perspectives.Design/methodology/approachI collected 471 responses using a questionnaire. In terms of empirical methods, I developed a structural equation model (SEM) to examine the relationship between psychological ownership and communication satisfaction as well as the mechanism underlying this relationship – namely, information behavior. Specifically, I first examined the relationship between psychological ownership and information behavior. I then developed a comprehensive framework for the double-edged impact of psychological ownership in virtual communities on communication satisfaction.FindingsI found that psychological ownership has a double-edged effect on communication satisfaction based on two types of information behavior in virtual communities. Specifically, organization-based psychological ownership (OPO) positively influences communication satisfaction through information exchange. In contrast, information-based psychological ownership (IPO) negatively impacts communication satisfaction through information-hiding.Originality/valueThe findings of this research demonstrate that psychological ownership has a double-edged effect on communication satisfaction. First, the findings of this study reveal the downsides of psychological ownership, which are not consistent with its beneficial role. Second, the negative effect of psychological ownership with regard to communication in virtual communities also helps explain communication failure in virtual communities. Finally, despite the downsides of psychological ownership in the context of a virtual community revealed by this study, this factor has an overall beneficial effect.

PurposeUsers' knowledge sharing provides valuable resources for brand community participants and is, therefore, critical for the viability of virtual brand communities. Drawing from both self-determination theory (SDT) and psychological ownership theory, the paper aims to investigate the impact of fulfillment of three basic psychological needs on brand users' knowledge-sharing behavior and examines psychological ownership as a mediator.Design/methodology/approachSurvey data consisting of 316 valid responses were collected from users of Huawei Pollen Club Community. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirmed the reliability and validity of measures, and hierarchical linear regression and bootstrapping were used to test all hypotheses.FindingsFulfillment of the need for autonomy, relatedness and competence in a virtual brand community boosts users' psychological ownership and has a positive influence on their knowledge-sharing behavior. Furthermore, psychological ownership partially mediates the relationships between the fulfillment of psychological needs and knowledge-sharing behavior. In addition, the authors found that when users participate in more offline brand activities, the positive impact of the fulfillment of the need for relatedness on psychological ownership is strengthened, while the positive impact of the fulfillment of the need for autonomy on psychological ownership is weakened.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the existing literature by exploring the relationships between fulfilling users' three basic psychological needs and their knowledge-sharing behavior through the mediating role of psychological ownership. The authors also provide insight into how offline brand activities interact with the fulfillment of psychological needs in virtual brand communities.

Previous research has identified the factors that affect the value co-creation in virtual community from the perspective of customer demands, however, less has been studied in the literature from the perspective of firms’ contract governance. Drawing on the literature on this topic, this paper focuses on the impact of contract governance on value co-creation in virtual community and introduces the belongingness, self-efficacy, and self-identity contained in psychological ownership of customers as moderators into the model. The findings show that contract governance has a positive effect on value co-creation in virtual community, psychological ownership has a positive moderating effect, which is mainly reflected in belongingness and self-identity of psychological ownership, but this effect is not obvious in self-efficacy of psychological ownership. This study will provide inspiration for brands to better manage virtual brand communities, enhance customers’ willingness to participate in value co-creation, and expand the research on transaction cost theory and value co-creation theory.

Even though negative aspects of making use of others’ work, such as illegal appropriation, have been found in online communities, remixing is considered a type of constructive creation for generating and recreating creative works. To make constructive creation via remixing sustainable, it is critical for users to share their own creations and allow others to use them in these online communities. We propose psychological ownership and social recognition as key antecedents for original creators to increase their intention to share their works in an online remix context. In this study, we aim to examine the relationships between intention to share, psychological ownership, and social recognition.To investigate the effects of psychological ownership and social recognition on intention to share, we proposed research hypotheses based on the theories of social recognition and psychological ownership. Prior to testing the hypotheses, we conducted a preliminary study including user interviews and community log analysis within an online remix community. Specific patterns of psychological ownership and social recognition in the online remix context were found in accordance with the theoretical background. The results from the preliminary study were applied to forms of apparatus and stimuli in the following experiment. A quasi-experiment was designed to test hypotheses of causal relationships between the key factors. A prototype of an online remix community for smartphone themes was developed based on the detailed findings of the preliminary study and utilized as an experimental apparatus. Sixty-nine participants carried out our experimental procedure of creating, sharing their own work, checking responses from others, and reporting their intention to share their future creations.The results of the quasi-experiment supported all our research hypotheses. Social recognition was found to increase the intention to share. Moreover, psychological ownership was found to increase the intention to share, an observation that may seem at odds with the exclusive aspects of ownership found in prior studies. More interesting, the positive effect of social recognition on intention to share becomes stronger with a higher perception of psychological ownership. This article ends with theoretical and practical implications of the study results.

Engaging in knowledge exchange: The instrumental psychological ownership in open innovation communities

Digital entrepreneurship

Purpose By participating in the business ecosystems, customers make both positive and negative impacts in the ecosystem. In particular, users of platform businesses participate in the business ecosystem as partial employees who voluntarily create and manage content. According to the organizational behavior literature, employees' psychological ownership toward the organization has an influence on the organizational competitiveness. Thus, with an assumption that customers gain psychological ownership toward the business that they participate in, it is important to analyze the process and the factors that influence their psychological ownership. This study proposes a research model that describes the process: customers undertake customer socialization, which then lead them to participate in the business-level and the business ecosystem-level activities. Through the participation, customers gain psychological ownership toward the business. Design/methodology/approach Based on a structural equation model, this study analyzes the data regarding the factors in the research model. Data was collected by surveying college students who represent themselves as Facebook and DaumKakao users. By analyzing the collected data, the relationships are validated between customer socialization and customer participations (i.e., both business-level and business ecosystem-level participation), and between the participations and customers' psychological ownership. Findings Based on the validation, this study confirms the importance of managing customers' psychological ownership and offers customers' participation by their socialization as a solution for increasing customers' psychological ownership. Also, this study proposes the business ecosystem research model as the general research framework for future research and expands the scope of strategic management from the individual level strategy to the business ecosystem wide perspective.

Online Communities were considered one of the most important innovations resulting from the Internet revolution. Community building and community development, i.e., community management were proclaimed as a key success factor in the digital economy differentiating business models in the digital economy from traditional ones. As a result online communities emerged in different forms –as part of online shops, as portal sites, as part of B2B platforms, or as design, relationship or game communities. At the same time research was mainly related to topics as for example how to build a community and how to gain critical mass and market shares as soon as possible. Today, findings show that in many cases online communities did not meet expectations. Only few online communities are financially sustainable, many disappeared and in many cases companies could not get the promised gains out of online communities. Consequently, the most important research questions concerning online communities are related to investigation of online communities through longitudinal studies and to questions how to build sustainable online communities providing financial success and other benefits to companies and customers. A related and newly emerging research area considers new forms of online communities – the so called mobile communities. This minitrack comprises a series of papers that align with the shifted emphasize of research related to online communities. The papers provide longitudinal studies and case studies of communities, address critical aspects of community building such as personalization and trust, provide design directions for new types of communities as mobile and implicit communities and propose new methods for assessment of the needs of community members.

Purpose Knowledge sharing is essential for the management and long-term sustainability of virtual communities (VCs). Although previous research has examined the factors that influence knowledge sharing in VCs, it has not determined whether their influence is equal across the different types of VCs. Thus, the aim of this study is to examine the influence of personal and contextual factors on knowledge sharing in two different types of VCs (VCs of interest and virtual learning communities). Design/methodology/approach A survey methodology was employed to collect data. The authors obtained 261 valid responses through an online survey distributed to various VCs of interest and virtual learning communities. Most respondents (73.95%) were aged between 21 and 30 years, were female (66.67%) and were enrolled in university programs (56.32%). Structural equation modeling was utilized to test the study’s hypotheses. Findings The results show that the type of VC moderates the positive influence of knowledge-sharing self-efficacy and perceived relative advantage on knowledge sharing. More specifically, the influence of self-efficacy on knowledge sharing is stronger in VCs of interest, whereas the influence of perceived relative advantage is stronger in virtual learning communities. Moreover, the influence of social identification on knowledge sharing is similar in both types of VCs. The authors also found that the norm of reciprocity has a nonsignificant influence on both types of VC. Originality/value The authors contribute to previous research on the effects of personal and contextual factors on knowledge-sharing models by highlighting the influential role of the type of VC.

Understanding the participation of passive members in online brand communities through the lens of psychological ownership theory

The purpose of this study was to find out the characteristics and meanings of mothers' daily experiences in online communities. To this end, on a selected online community bulletin board were collected from April 1 to April 30, 2020, and repeated comparative analysis was conducted. According to the study, mothers in the online community shared their concerns and information about parenting together in the first, ‘Child-raising Together.’ Second, ‘new encounter’ was forming a new community in an unfamiliar place. Third, the ‘laugh together, cry together’ showed the appearance of helping each other by exchanging information on daily life. This study is significant in that it can be used as a basic data for understanding mothers' daily life and seeking ways to support online services for parents.

Purpose Engaging consumers with brands to generate multiple benefits has become critical for the firms. In this direction, this paper aims to study perceived brand authenticity’s role in engendering online brand community engagement. Brand commitment and positive word of mouth were tested as the outcomes of online brand community engagement. This paper also examines the moderation of psychological brand ownership. Design/methodology/approach A theoretically robust model based on relevant literature on online brand community engagement is tested using data from 428 users of various firm-hosted brand communities. Findings Perceived brand authenticity’s three dimensions, i.e. credibility, continuity and symbolism, emerged as predictors of online brand community engagement. Brand commitment and positive word of mouth were also established, stemming from online brand community engagement. Also, psychological brand ownership partially moderated the relationship between perceived brand authenticity and online brand community engagement. Research limitations/implications Future studies are suggested to test this framework’s relevance in other contexts to capture the essence of online brand community engagement. Originality/value This study demonstrates perceived brand authenticity as a vital precursor to online brand community engagement. Second, the study offers brand commitment and positive word of mouth as valuable outcomes of online brand community engagement. Third, current work establishes psychological brand ownership as a moderator in the context of authentic brands.

Reviewed by: Designing Online Communities: How Designers, Developers, Community Managers, and Software Structure Discourse and Knowledge Production on the Web by Trevor Owens Gabriel Malo (bio) Designing Online Communities: How Designers, Developers, Community Managers, and Software Structure Discourse and Knowledge Production on the Web. By Trevor Owens. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. Pp. 139. $36.95. For those whose research centers on online communities, there is a bounty of publicly posted and easily accessible data in the form of user-created content. In light of this, it seems as though conducting traditional qualitative research on online communities should be unequivocally assisted by this largesse of information. In Designing Online Communities, however, Trevor Owens addresses and makes visible a gap in the existing methodologies currently utilized to assess the digital content produced by online communities. He argues that existing work in digital methodologies as it stands is lacking an effective understanding of the design context in which this content is produced. He proposes that researchers who study online communities should be familiar with the design protocols through which they are coded, presented, and moderated. He further expands this into his final suggestion that the input and knowledge of those engaged in such research would be a valuable asset for designers who are currently working on new and emerging platforms for online congregation and communication. Throughout the book, Owens’s perspective as a prominent digital archivist—employed at the time of the book’s writing at the Library of Congress—with a doctoral focus on social science research methods is apparent. His archivist’s eye encourages researchers of online communities to look not only at the digital materials that are created by the users of these communities, but also the context within which these materials came into being. Owens defines context not only as a matter of physical and temporal space, but also as a matter of positionality within a technological landscape comprised of rules, moderation, and methods of display. To this end, his book functions as an analysis of twenty-eight previous works in the field, with a focus on determining whether and how they discuss particular technological aspects of online communities. As well, there is a focus on how those aspects are incorporated into the socio-cognitive framework that the authors use in order to explain online communities and their users (pp. 38–39). This analysis situates him strongly among existing work in the field as it highlights his own technologically mindful approach to qualitative analysis. His discussion of these works is then extended into a history of online communities, segueing eventually into an investigation of the ways in which online systems of control and content management affect both the ways in which online communities develop and the type of content that those communities produce. The conclusions that Owens comes to through this analysis possess strong implications for those who wish to engage in meaningful research [End Page 302] involving online communities. His line of argument makes the strong case that the virtual contents produced by online communities are in and of themselves an incomplete data set for analysis. He establishes that there is significant insight to be had in understanding that which is absent from the records due to the exercise of technological modes of control, and therefore in understanding what, exactly, comprises those modes of control. His discussion and analysis of these technological aspects, and his discussion of how they have or haven’t been treated by existing work in the field is the book’s strongest feature. His suggestion that the designers of online communities and those who study those communities should be engaged in conversation surrounding both the design and social scientific analysis of these communities is also especially well-supported and important. More attention, however, could have been paid to the willful manipulation of technological systems by users. His discussion of reputation systems touches briefly on this phenomenon, but does not fully engage with it. A more thorough look at user-moderated content could bolster his discussion of the methodological limitations of existing research on online communities. Overall, however, the book’s analysis and conclusions are well-supported, and the text as a whole is...