THE CENTRAL ROLE OF ENGAGEMENT AND SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING IN VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES

Individuals’ willingness to help the virtual community (VC) and individual members are is known as a key to the survival and success of a virtual community. Prior research on has proposed that engagement plays a central role in online communities. Although researchers implicitly concur on the significance of happiness and satisfaction with online social life in the context of VC, the notion of subjective well-being itself remains relatively little understood in the information systems literature. We propose that subjective well-being is critical to active participation in online social environments. We will construct and test a framework that demonstrates how it powerfully explains members’ helping behaviors in VCs. In particular, our model predicts that subjective well-being will promote willingness to help the VC, while engagement will promote subjective well-being and willingness to help individual members. In addition, three types of social (community) identity (cognitive, evaluative and affective), psychological climate and social support will have direct or indirect effects on engagement and subjective well-being. We will test the proposed research model through the use of data collected from users of a professional virtual community dedicated to sharing knowledge about information technology