Online communities have suffered from their members’ intermittent, dormant, or nonexistent participation. We propose that prominence, which refers to the salience of community members’ psychological proximity to their community, differs from the engagement construct, which denotes a psychological dedication to behave prosaically toward other community members. Whereas engagement has been increasingly examined as a driver of online community behavior, the role of prominence has received a minimal amount of attention in the literature. Drawing on self-determination theory, we developed a framework that proposes the prominence construct as a phenomenon distinctive from engagement in its nature, formation, and behavioral outcomes. Our findings based on two studies indicate that the proposed model with prominence performs considerably better than the existing model with only engagement. Our conceptual model contributes to Information Systems research by laying a strong theoretical foundation to differentiate between the behavioral paths of the autonomous prominence construct and its controlled engagement counterpart.

The major challenge for social networking services (SNS) has been in getting users to exhibit prosocial behavior by active participation in creating and sharing content. We seek to integrate and reconcile the varying, and sometimes conflicting, explanations of prosocial behaviors at SNS. Rooted in postadoption behavior and commitment theory, our study offers three distinct mechanisms that regulate how one’s experience at an SNS translates into commitment that leads to prosocial behavior. In particular, satisfaction, affective commitment, and active participation substantiate a dedication-based mechanism; past investments, continuance commitment, and resulting inattention to alternatives form a constraint-based mechanism; and social support, normative commitment and users’ intentions to moderate comments are a third, obligation-based mechanism. We empirically tested this tripartite model against data collected from actual Facebook users. The results of our analysis supported the proposed relationships between each mechanism’s experiential factor, mediating type of commitment, and prosocial outcome. Intermechanism effects were rare between commitment mediators and outcomes, they were common between experiential antecedents and commitment factors. Understanding these mechanisms allows SNS managers to fine-tune their service experience to promote specific prosocial behaviors. Meanwhile, researchers benefit from our overarching view of prosocial behavior at SNS that helps to combine and contrast emergent perspectives and theories.

We investigate the changing causal relationships between cyberloafing behavior and its antecedents after the announcement of formal organizational controls that, unlike informal controls, are officially imposed by organizations. Drawing on Akers’s social learning theory, we first propose neutralization, perceived risk, past cyberloafing, and peer cyberloafing as antecedents of cyberloafing. We then develop a theoretical account of how their impacts change from before to after the announcement of formal controls. The proposed model was empirically tested using data collected from two separate surveys administered a month apart. The first survey captured the preannouncement state of cyberloafing among respondents; the follow-up survey was administered after the respondents were asked to assume that their company had just announced anti-cyberloafing controls that used explicit monitoring and sanctions. We show that preannouncement, employees’ intentions to cyberloaf are mostly influenced by their past tendencies to cyberloaf and by others’ cyberloafing, but their neutralization and perceived risk play no significant role. In contrast, postannouncement, the impacts of individuals’ neutralization and perceived risk on their cyberloafing suddenly become significant. Theoretically, we demonstrate that to accurately predict noncompliant behavior, it is important to account for all four antecedents and incorporate the announcement of formal controls. Practically, understanding how this announcement affects the relationships between cyberloafing and its antecedents suggests different areas managers need to target, pre- and postannouncement, to curb cyberloafing.