Antecedents of online community commitment and its effect on behavioural intentions in China

Abstract

Social media has captured a major part of people’s daily communication in recent years. As an important component of social media platform, online communities has attracted remarkable popularity and has greatly influenced the normal people’s lives. Both researchers and practitioners have predicted this phenomenon will bring new opportunities and challenges to the business. However, due to the new social media phenomenon, research in this field is yet to mature. In addition, because of online community’s virtual features and low switching cost, members frequently join and leave the communities. Therefore, previous researches have highlighted factors that influence customers’ online community engagement and commitment from different perspective. After reviewing the existing literature related to the antecedents of online community commitment, this study aims to study what are the core factors that may influence online community members’ commitment and how it shapes their behavioural intentions. To facilitate this research objective, this study proposes a holistic model with five hypotheses to explore antecedents of online community commitment from three aspects: personal influences, social influences, and online community characteristics based on Relationship Marketing Theory, Social Influence Model, and Framework of Community Characteristics. In addition, this study tests the effects of online community commitment on members’ behavioural intentions. Lastly, this study stresses on adopting advertising as a moderating factor to investigate the moderating role of advertising on the relationship of online community commitment and behavioural intentions. To initiate this research, an online survey approach was taken. A total of 999 validated questionnaires were collected from ten top maternal and baby care related online communities in China, which were selected based on the ranking from http://top.chinaz.com. Partial least squares based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the collected data. Overall, the results indicated that the proposed holistic model of online community commitment fulfil the principles of a parsimonious model with good predictive ability. The results also show that the collected data fits the proposed model well and support all the proposed hypotheses except H5. Specifically, the results revealed that personal influences, social influences, and online community characteristics gave positive effects on online community commitment. In addition, online community commitment also positively influences the members’ behavioural intentions. However, the impact of online community commitment on behavioural intentions moderated by the level of advertising was not supported. Overall, this study proposed and tested a holistic model of online community commitment which has a theoretical significance and also enhance understanding of consumer behaviour in online communities in China, especially in maternal and baby care related industry.