How Types of Expectancy for Growth Foster Members' Commitment to Gamified Communities: the Perspective of Community Value

Research Problem and Practical Importance: Virtual communities can assist information system (IS) providers to construct a loyal user base. Thus, research investigating how to facilitate the development of virtual communities will enable IS providers to secure their sustainability, indicating its practical importance. Among recent IS research and practice, gamification emerges as a novel topic. Gamification instills the users' expectation to raise the avatar level, i.e., expectancy for growth. However, little is known about whether and how different targets of expectancy impact the commitment of gamified community members, indicating a research gap. In practice, research filling this gap can help IS providers understand the mechanisms underlying the development of virtual communities. Such understandings will effectively support gamified IS to build strongly connected virtual communities.Academic Importance: Gamification is an emerging issue and has recently been popular in the high quality IS and EC journals. The project results will help provide novel IS knowledge which fits the recent trend and leads the development of the future studies.Research Purpose: This two-year project will examine how different types of expectancy for growth in using gamified IS could impact the members’ commitment to gamified virtual communities. Expectancy value theory and positive reinforcement theory are used to explain this complex phenomenon. Specifically, this project proposes three dimensions of expectancy for growth: expectancy for skill growth, expectancy for status growth, and expectancy for relationship growth and examines their potential effect on two dimensions of commitment (calculative commitment and affective commitment). The project scope also covers the mechanism underlying such effects. Accordingly, the research model also includes community member reactions (exploration, quantified self, interdependence) and gamified community value (experiential value, symbolic value, and social value). The overall contribution is to establish the theory around types of expectancy for growth and the process mechanism to explain how each type could foster the commitment of virtual community members. Research Design: This project will adopt the longitudinal design in a two-year span to enhance the validity in deriving casual relationships. This design assures the temporal order and alleviates the concern on common method bias. Survey methods will be used to collect data. Confirmation factor analyses will be used for testing the reliability and validity of the measurement scales and the fit between data and the model. Structural equation modeling will be used for testing the framework and the main effects.Significance: This project employs two theories to construct the research model. The research model is original and innovative in explaining and examining how novel IS could assist development of virtual communities and the underlying mechanisms, providing novel and rigorous knowledge. Practically, this project will assist designing of gamified IS, supporting the growth of virtual communities, lifting the sustainability of IS, and further promoting the prosperous development of information economy and EC in Taiwan.

Project ID:PB10907-4738
External Project ID:MOST109-2410-H182-014-MY2