A Model for Understanding Success of Virtual Community Management Teams

Virtual communities enable people with common interests to interact with each other. Until today, research has mostly focused on the aspects of social interaction, usability and success factors for virtual communities. But due to the link between effective coordination of management teams and success of virtual communities, virtual community management becomes of great importance for both research and practice. Therefore, the imperative of this research is to develop an understanding of what drives management teams of successful virtual communities. Drawing on existing literature, we identify relevant theories and use a previous exploratory case study in order to provide a theoretical explanation of the variables and factors that affect the success of virtual community management teams. Furthermore, we provide first suggestions for measurement instruments in order to subsequently test our proposed model using empirical, quantitative methods.