The Effects of Lead Userness and Technical Knowledge on The Development of Commitment to User Online Communities

As internet has been widespread, Online user communities are considered as the main source of user innovations. Because online user communities are established on the basis of users’ voluntary participation, users’... [ view full abstract ]

As internet has been widespread, Online user communities are considered as the main source of user innovations. Because online user communities are established on the basis of users’ voluntary participation, users’ community commitment is a critical issue for their survival. Many online communities have found that members of the community may develop commitment to the community with distinct mindsets: ‘affect’, ‘obligation’, or ‘need’. We also deal with three components of commitment within community context based on their ‘core essence’. In this paper, two characteristics of users are considered as the antecedent variables that affect the development of community commitment: ‘lead userness’ and ‘technical knowledge level’. Lead users who are at the leading edge of a trend and have high expected benefits from solutions have been identified as the main source of innovations and innovative ideas. Technical knowledge is an essential resource in developing innovations. Due to the strong desire for solutions, lead users are more likely to learn technical knowledge to apply during the innovation development process. However, within the context where the perceived costs to obtain sufficient technical knowledge is too significant to overcome, users are likely to give up obtaining technical knowledge. Thus, we expect that users without technical knowledge would contribute to community activities differently with those with development ability, and develop hypotheses that explain how each characteristic directly and interactively affect the development of community commitment. In this paper, to test our hypotheses, we choose an online game ‘WoW’ community where gamers gather to develop their own software programs, called ‘add-ons’, which provide competitive functions in game. As a result, we have found the positive effects of lead userness on affective and normative community commitment, and the negative effects of lead userness on continuance community commitment. It also has found that the technical knowledge level is negatively related to continuance community commitment, and the interaction effects between two user characteristics on normative and continuance community commitment are identified significantly.