The role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations on cyber- market mavenism's information sharing behavior

Abstract

Motivation is extensively regarded as the most important factor affecting individual behavior due to its determining impact on the intensity, strength, persistence, purpose, or direction of customer behavior, especially on social network sites (SNS). Building strategic marketing communications to share knowledge and information about products and services online revealed the role of the market maven in sharing information. Research on the motivation of market mavenism is a relatively new phenomenon, and the current literature on cyber-market mavenism is minimal. Research on multiple areas of market mavenism needs to be expanded. This study investigated the association between intrinsic motivations (altruism, self-enjoyment, moral obligation, and self-efficacy) and extrinsic motivations (reputation, reciprocity, belongingness, and social interaction) and their role in cyber market mavenism, which leads to information sharing behavior. Also, the research aims to study the influential factor of the moderators, including demographic characteristics such as gender and age. The conceptual model for this study was developed by leveraging the theoretical perspectives, namely the motivational theory and social theory. The positivism doctrine through the deductive method is utilised to test the hypothesis. The sample size was chosen based on statistical power. The model for the current research includes ten constructs. Therefore, a sample size of more than 189 was appropriate. An online survey via Google form was used to collect data from Iraqi SNS users. There was a total of 431 responses, with a response rate of 86%. After checking the data for outliers, cleaning, normality, and missing data, 372 responses were selected. To empirically investigate the theoretical model, both SPSS and SmartPLS have been used to analyze the collected data for the quantitative analysis. Furthermore, multigroup analysis (MGA) was used to analyse the moderation effect of gender and age. The empirical findings confirmed that altruism and self-efficacy from intrinsic motivations and reputation and social interaction from extrinsic motivations have a significant and positive effect on cyber market mavenism. The results also show that cyber market mavenism does have an impact on information sharing behavior. In addition, the results on the moderation effect using MGA revealed significant and nonsignificant differences for gender and age in the whole model, respectively. Researchers and academics can use this research to strengthen theories and models adoption in better understanding the role of cyber market mavenism in buying behavior. The limitation of this study is it only focused on the positive elements of the propensity to cyber market mavenism. However, future research could address the antecedents and effects of the negative aspects of the tendency to cyber market mavenism.