Sustained Participation in Virtual Communities from a Self-Determination Perspective

Customers' participation and contribution are vital to the sustainability of virtual communities (VCs) platform while people have many options to freely surf on the Internet. Sustained participation, instead of initial participation, is more meaningful to virtual communities' sustained development. From the perspective of self-determination theory, this paper explores the effect of community artifacts on sustained participations through users' satisfaction of psychological need and virtual community identification. With empirical studies in two types of virtual community platforms (interest-based and relational-based), our results reveal several important findings. Firstly, this study finds that virtual co-presence and deep profiling can increase users' satisfaction of inner psychological needs. But the use of persistent labeling does not affect the user's satisfaction of psychological needs. In addition, self-presentation is positively related to relational-based community, and rather has no impact on interest-based community. Secondly, this study finds that there exists a positive relationship between users' satisfied psychological needs and virtual community identification. Finally, virtual community identification significantly impacts sustained participation. This paper offers a new perspective on the psychological mechanism of sustained participation and yields important implications for the managerial practice.