How to alleviate social loafing in online brand communities: The roles of community support and commitment

Recent research has found that social loafing (SL) can severely restrict the development of online brand communities (OBCs). To examine the effects of community support and commitment to SL in OBCs, this paper collected data from 274 members of OBCs and applied the PLS-SEM approach to estimate the conceptual model. The results indicate that (1) Community support positively influences three dimensions of community commitment. (2) Community commitment plays a mediating role between community support and SL, and different commitment paths have different effects on SL: Affective commitment is found negatively to influence SL and normative commitment positively to influence it, but continuance commitment is not found to exert an influence. (3) Membership length only moderates the relationship between normative commitment and SL. This study not only examines the mediating role of community commitment between community support and SL, but also analyzes different effects of the three dimensions of community commitment on SL, thus providing key points of guidance for alleviating SL in OBCs.