Sense of Community: A Missing Link to Understand Users’ Performance in Firm-hosted Online Communities

We extended the current research stream about online communities by introducing sense of community as a new construct to understand the motivations of online collective and relational actions and highlight users’ loyal promotion to both the online community and the host firm. In addition, through the lens of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), membership performance was presented as a form of users’ voluntary participation, voluntary cooperation, and firm-hosted loyalty, indicating users’ total contribution to the online community and the host firm. We then examined the relationships between membership performance and its potential drivers. The research model was empirically tested using self-reported data from 247 users of four firm-hosted online communities. Overall, we found that sense of community, trust in the host firm, and community loyalty have either full or partial effects on membership performance.