Research On Alleviating Social Loafing Of Online Brand Communities

In the age of social media,enterprises consider building an online brand community,trying to strengthen the connection between the brand and consumers and enhance the competitive advantage of brand.However,social loafing is common in online brand community,and it makes online community inactive and difficult to develop healthily.At present,the literature on social loafing mainly focuses on the two research backgrounds of face-to-face team and virtual team,and the research on social loafing of online community is relatively rare.In the field of organizational behavior,studies have shown that employees' commitment is a key factor to alleviate social loafing.In fact,an online brand community is a formal virtual organization whose members can be considered as the community's employees.Therefore,this study analyzes how to reduce the social loafing in online brand community from the perspective of community commitment theory.Taking online brand communities as the background,and integrating social exchange theory,community commitment theory and social loafing theory,this paper estimates a conceptual model of how community support influences social loafing through the three aspects of community commitment(affective commitment,normative commitment and continuance commitment),and considers the moderating role of membership length.Meanwhile,310 valid samples were collected by online questionnaires,and the PLS-SEM approach was applied to estimate the conceptual model.Results indicate that community support positively influences three dimensions of community commitment.Affective commitment is found negatively to influence social loafing and normative commitment positively to influence it,but continuance commitment is not found to exert an influence.Membership length just moderates the relationship between normative commitment and social loafing.Specifically,normative commitment does not influence social loafing when membership length is short,but does when the membership length is long.This paper enriches the research results of online brand community,social exchange theory,community commitment theory and social loafing theory.Firstly,this study focuses on the negative participation behavior of online brand communities,providing a new perspective for the research on the behavior of community members.Secondly,this study clarifies the differentiated influence of community support on the three dimensions of community commitment.Thirdly,this study re-veals the influence of community commitment on social loafing and its boundary conditions.In addition,in order to alleviate the online brand community social loafing,put forward the following targeted suggestions.Firstly,it is important to improve members,perception of community support.Secondly,it is imperative to strengthen members' emotional attachment to the community.Thirdly,it is essential to give members more freedom while cultivating their sense of obligation.