Motivations in Virtual Communities: a Literature Review

Giovanni Camponovo, University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland

1. Introduction
Relevance: virtual communities are characterized by a group of people that actively participate and interact through an electronic medium, have shared interests and common social norms. They are one of the major and fastest developing trends in the ICT landscape. Their key challenge is the ability to attract a critical mass of contributing users and make them contribute. Research question: what motivates users to join and participate in virtual communities ? Motivations are general or context sensitive ? Methodology: literature review of studies of user motivation in various types of virtual communities.

2. Framework
Motivation theories and factors: the main motivation factor proposed by the most popular motivation theories1 are: Internal (psychological) factors: Enjoyment (SDT, PBT) Competence (SCT, SDT, PBT) Values (SDT, PBT) Social factors: Relations (SDT, PBT) Social capital (TRA TPB UTAUT IDT SDT) Reciprocity (TRA, TPB, UTAUT, IDT, SDT) Utilitarian factors: Utility (EVT, TAM, UTAUT, SCT, IDT, SDT) Effort (EVT, TAM, UTAUT, IDT) Facilitating conditions (UTAUT, IDT)
1.
Motivation theories considered : Expectancy Valence Theory (EVT), Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT), Social cognitive theory (SCT), Prosocial behavior theory (PBT), Self Determination Theory (SDT), Uses and Gratification Theory (UGT)

A taxonomy of virtual communities: communities can be classified using two criteria who can influence motivations: purpose and organization structure.
Social / Fun
Fun
gaming, UGC

Competence
Expertise
practice nets

Resource
Commerce
e-markets

Relations
social network

Learning
open source

Resources
P2P, wireless

PURE
memberinitiated

HYBRID
organizationsponsored

3. Results
Social: communities of practice Competence: open source Resource: wireless communities

Motivations in communities of practice are composite: social factors are key in both public and enterprise-based communities; internal (altruistic values) and utilitarian (get useful info) are important in public communities, whereas competence (look competent) is key in enterprise contexts.

Open source participants are motivated by internal factors, especially competence (improve skills, challenges) and idealistic values (open source concept). Other factors, of utilitarian (software satisfies own needs, developer is paid) and social (peer recognition) nature also play a role.

Wireless community members are mainly driven by utilitarian factors (use of the community network). Internal factors like values (altruism, promote free access) and competence are also important, specially in pure communities. Social factors are often cited but are typically less salient.

4. Conclusions
Conclusions: Motivations in virtual communities are composite and include a mix of psychological, social and utilitarian factors. Such factors are common for all types of community, but their importance varies based on community purpose (social motivation in social-oriented, internal in competence-oriented, utilitarian in resource-oriented communities) and structure (social and internal factors in pure, utilitarian in hybrid communities) Further research: the paper proposes a framework for studying motivation in virtual communities based on a list of motivations issued and a taxonomy of community types. It may be used to better understand motivations and their relation with the different community contexts.

5th European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation, 8-9 September 2011, Como, Italy