An empirical study of community cohesiveness, community attachment, and their roles in virtual community participation
研究了虚拟社区中成员被动与主动参与的差异，发现社区凝聚力和社区依恋均正向影响主动参与，而被动参与仅受社区依恋影响。
Although active participation of members is a critical success factor for virtual communities, few members actively participate in activities in virtual communities (e.g., posting, commenting, sharing, etc.). This study explores the differences between passive and active community participation from community cohesiveness and community attachment perspectives. Drawing upon a context-specific cohesiveness-attachment-participation framework based on cognition-affection-conation traits of human psychology, we propose a research model and empirically test the roles of community cohesiveness and attachment in virtual community participation. The results suggest that community members’ active participation is positively influenced by both community cohesiveness and community attachment. Visitation, as the passive mode of participation, is influenced by community attachment only. The findings not only inspire future IS research to consider community cohesiveness, attachment, and participation as vital research constructs in other social contexts, but it also helps managers build managerial actions, such as prioritising their limited business resources to increase community members’ active participation, for the success of virtual communities.