Roles of community commitment and community atmosphere: an empirical study of online community success

Online communities have become quite popular, and both practitioners and researchers have focused on the determinants of and the evaluation of online community success. The success of online community is not only embodied in the usage but also on the members’ intention to stick with the community over time. Based on the updated DeLone and McLean’s IS Success Model, and incorporating the theory of organization commitment, we propose a research model to investigate the key factors that lead to online community success. In our model, we depict the roles of community commitment and community atmosphere. On the basis of the existed scales, we develop an instrument and design a questionnaire. We conduct a survey and collect 273 answered responses in Xi’an. We use AMOS7.0 to make an analysis of the collected data. Our result indicates that continuance and affective community commitment have prominent influences on members’ usage behavior; but system quality, information quality, and community atmosphere do not affect the three components of community commitment simultaneously. System quality and information quality help to increase members’ continuance community commitment, and information quality and community atmosphere have a significant effect on affective commitment. This study may enrich the understanding of online community success by considering the roles of community commitment and their relationship with members’ usage.