Research on the Relationship Between Cross-Level Motivation, Integrated Emotion, and Virtual Knowledge Community Commitment

• Main Authors: Bing Sun, Hongying Mao, Min Kang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-07-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: motivation level; integrated emotion; community commitment; multiple intermediary; interactive complement
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.563024/full

Community commitment is the key to the success of virtual communities. Under the background of virtual knowledge community, based on motivation hierarchy model and integrated emotion theory, this paper takes “motivation-emotion-community commitment” as the main framework, and introduces multiple mediation and regulation functions to establish the relationship model of motivation hierarchy, integrated emotions, and community commitment. The results show that the user motivation follows the hierarchical structure of the layer-by-layer influence from the situational level to the personality level, that is, knowledge-seeking motivation and entertainment-seeking motivation at a situational level will positively affect social- interaction motivation at the contextual level, thereby enhancing user self-efficacy at personality level. Users have abundant integrated emotions toward the virtual knowledge community, namely, satisfaction, attachment, and identity, and such multi-integrated emotional model is more conducive for promoting community commitment of users. At the same time, attachment, identity, and satisfaction have an interactive complement, that is, when satisfaction is low, attachment and identity will complement and strengthen community commitment.