Online Community Commitment
From Information Systems at Pitt Business
Online communities rely on the efforts (e.g. posting messages) of their members to be sustainable. Numerous online communities exist around any similar topic. For communities, this creates the problem of competition for members who are willing to stay in a community and do the work. For members this creates the benefit of having multiple choices to pick from, with low switching costs. Why then would members choose to stay in a given community and do the work needed to make the community sustainable?
Commitment is one explanation. When using a community members develop a set of bonds (commitment types) to the community. Members continue to use the community in part to these bonds, as they: like (affective commitment) the community, feel an obligation (normative commitment) toward the community, or feel it would be too costly (continuance commitment) for them to leave. Members with each type of commitment bond are valuable to a community as each commitment type influences members’ behaviors in different ways. Community administrators should recognize that there is not an “ideal” commitment member and should stop trying to attract them. Rather, administrators should look to manage the diversity of members within their community in order to manage towards success.
To read more, check out the paper on Community Commitment: How Affect, Obligation, and Necessity Drive Online Behaviors by Patrick Bateman, Peter Gray, and Brian Butler.
This paper was originally presented at and published in the proceedings for Twenty-Seventh International Conference on Information Systems, Milwaukee 2006. To see what was presented, check out the powerpoint slides from ICIS 2006 Community Commitment presentation.
[edit] Abstract
Online communities have become a major medium for social interaction amongst Internet users. However, communities addressing similar topics often have a considerable overlap in resources, which makes them at least partial substitutes for each other. Given the ease with which these resources can be accessed, why would individuals choose to return repeatedly to one community, and indeed go on to invest additional time and energy in doing the voluntary work necessary to keep that community going?
We draw on organizational commitment theory to propose an integrated framework for understanding why community members perform three essential kinds of voluntary behaviors – community citizenship behaviors, content provision, and audience engagement. Commitment theory argues that three kinds of bonds (affect-based, norm-based, and cost-based) may form between individuals and organizations, and we adapt this theory to an online community context. Our results indicate that each form of commitment has a contrasting influence on members’ performance of voluntary behaviors in the community. Community citizenship behaviors are driven by affective and normative commitment, content provision by affective and continuance commitment, and audience engagement by continuance commitment alone. Using this established theoretical framework allows us to model and simultaneously test a range of motivations, thereby producing a more integrated perspective that offers greater precision in predicting a variety of important online behaviors.
[edit] Keywords
Online communities, virtual communities, virtual groups, commitment, online behavior, community citizenship, audience engagement
