An empirical study of community cohesiveness, community attachment, and their roles in virtual community participation

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.