Sense of virtual community, commitment and knowledge contribution: an empirical research based on MI community

Shanji Yao, Xinnuo Zheng and Dewen Liu

Nankai Business Review International, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 131-154

Abstract: Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to find a way to encourage community members to actively create content and contribute knowledge through the study of the relationship between virtual community awareness, commitment and knowledge contribution, so as to make virtual community revitalize and provide a better platform for enterprises to carry out network marketing. Design/methodology/approach - This study establishes a theoretical model that member knowledge contribution’s prepositive impact in virtual community. SOVC is an independent variable, commitment is a mediating variable and knowledge contribution is a dependent variable. Through 139 valid questionnaires from MI community, relationships among sense of virtual community (SOVC), commitment and knowledge contribution are deeply discussed. Findings - Empirical results show that, as three dimensions of SOVC, membership, influence and immersion can all drive commitment and knowledge contribution in different degrees. In the two-dimensional division of commitment, only affective commitment can drive knowledge contribution. Affective commitment and calculative commitment can play a mediating role in the impact of SOVC on knowledge contribution. Originality/value - Empirical research that the academia has done on important issues such as the impact of SOVC and commitment on knowledge contribution is deficient. Furthermore, those researches which have explored the mediating effect of commitment in the impact of SOVC on knowledge contribution remain merely on theoretical deduction level, and empirical studies based on Chinese background are also rare. In China, MI community is the typical representative of virtual community that runs successfully, and choosing it to conduct research can not only provide representatives on sample but also duplicate on the result popularity. Thus, this paper chooses MI community as the empirical object to explore the relationships among SOVC, commitment and knowledge contribution.

Keywords: Sense of virtual community; Commitment; Knowledge contribution; MI community (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:nbripp:nbri-10-2019-0053

DOI: 10.1108/NBRI-10-2019-0053

Access Statistics for this article

Nankai Business Review International is currently edited by Dr Xuexiu Wang and Professor Li Wei'an

More articles in Nankai Business Review International from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().