عوامل اعتماد موثر بر اعضای جامعه مجازی: مطالعه جوامع تراکنش

Virtual community is a valuable business medium for web vendors in terms of disseminating information and retaining customers. This research investigates the underlying driving forces that cultivate both the trust and returning behavior of virtual community members. In particular, this research examines the influence of shared values, satisfaction with previous interactions, and website privacy policies on the trust of 381 active virtual community members. The findings suggest that the shared values of virtual community members have a positive impact on both trust and relationship commitment. Second, satisfaction with previous interactions not only increases the level of trust in virtual community members, but also enhances relationship commitment and member stickiness. Third, website privacy policies enhance the level of trust significantly. Finally, trust shows a positive and significant effect on both the stickiness and the commitment of virtual community members.

The widespread rise of virtual community has changed the way of social interactions. Virtual community comprises communication platform and a social network through which people holding the same interests and concerns can interact with one another in cyberspaces ( Turban et al., 2006 and McKnight et al., 2002). The popularity of virtual communities has opened a new avenue for e-vendors to enhance website visibility and generate web traffic (Hagel and Armstrong, 1997). A virtual community serves both social and business functions. From the social perspective, a virtual community provides a communication platform and a social network—fostering interaction between individuals. The members of these communities come together to develop friendships, share common interests, and exchange information (Hagel and Armstrong, 1997). From the business perspective, a virtual community comprises a viable trading and marketing platform that enables commercial interaction between sellers, buyers, and intermediaries (Schubert and Ginsburg, 2000). Hagel and Armstrong (1997) suggested that a virtual community provided three major business functions. First, virtual communities allow e-vendors to leverage customers' ideas in terms of designing and customizing new products. For example, the rich information generated within virtual communities provides valuable insight and feedback on the quality of existing products and services, which in turn allows organizations to continuously improve products. Second, a virtual community can serve as an operational mechanism through which organizations can pursue targeted marketing and consequently stimulate transaction tendencies. For instance, a detailed customer transaction history yields rich data in regards to customer preferences and transaction intensity, which enhances the ability of e-vendors to identify current and potential customers. Third, a virtual community represents a tremendous opportunity for e-vendors to reach a critical mass of purchasing power at a minimum cost. Despite promising in terms of e-commerce, Internet-based virtual communities are relatively informal, and their business value remains subject to members' willingness to constantly employ the virtual community for information exchanges and business transactions. Steady traffic flow to the site and member loyalty are both imperative for a virtual community to be commercially useful. Prior research has designated trust and relationship commitment as key facilitators of e-commerce (Bhattacherjee, 2002, Morgan and Hunt, 1994, McKnight et al., 2002 and Eastlick et al., 2006). Empirical research in this area has primarily focused on online shoppers. However, virtual community members are expressly different from the conventional e-shoppers because the social groups are able to balance the power associated with both vendors and customers through the release and exchange of information (Hagel and Armstrong, 1997). Thus, a gap exists in terms of the underlying dimensions, causes, and effects of trust on virtual community members. This quantitative research applies the commitment–trust theory of relationship marketing to investigate trust factors associated with virtual communities and their consequents. Following the introduction, the next section presents the theoretical background through a review of the literature on trust and the commitment–trust theory of relationship marketing. Next, the research model, the hypotheses, and the research methods are discussed. The final section summarizes the findings as well as research implications.

This research intends to gain a better understanding of the underlying factors involved in the formation of trust and commitment of virtual members. It tests the impact of shared values, privacy policy, and satisfaction on trust in the context of virtual community. Furthermore, it considers shared values, satisfaction, and trust as three important predictors of commitment, and also verifies the impact of commitment on stickiness. By dividing trust into four dimensions, the empirical findings explicitly demonstrate the relationship between these antecedents and each dimension of trust. Consistent with prior research, shared values are predictor of trust and commitment (Morgan and Hunt, 1994 and MacMillan et al., 2005). The research results suggest that shared values substantially enhance the perceived ability, benevolence, and predictability of a virtual community. Results also demonstrate strong support for the impact of shared values on member commitment. However, shared values do not influence individual perceptions of integrity. A possible explanation for this phenomenon is that shared values represent common behavior guidelines only—they do not manifest personal characteristics in the context of a virtual community. The virtual community is a unique phenomenon in that individual identity is ambiguous and social relationships are built on computer-mediated interactions. Identity is an important factor in terms of assessing the reliability and trustworthiness of the counterpart. The absence of identity may deflate the impact of shared values and increase the difficulty of assessing the integrity of the counterpart. The research results raise a concern that developing shared values may be insufficient in terms of accelerating the level of perceived integrity. Therefore, web vendors should consider providing advanced rules on identity disclosure and verification to foster perceived integrity. The impact of a privacy policy on trust is significant and consistent with the previous research (Eastlick et al., 2006). The privacy policy, being one of the security mechanisms that protect individual information, contributes to perceived information-control and information-security, and thus delivers signals of ability, benevolence, integrity, and predictability. This implies that e-vendor should develop and strictly adhere to their privacy policy to alleviate the concerns about data collection and information use. The impact of satisfaction on both trust and commitment is also consistent with previous findings (Li et al., 2006). Our findings suggest that the member's satisfaction with his/her past experiences and interactions with the virtual community may exert lasting social relationship. Results also indicate that satisfaction can impact on commitment via trust. Based on these research results, merely developing shared values is insufficient in terms of fostering a level of trust. Web vendors should consider the development of advanced operational mechanisms and online services to improve member satisfaction. Our results indicate a partial relationship between trust–commitment only—a research finding that departs from previous empirical results (Morgan and Hunt, 1994, MacMillan et al., 2005 and Eastlick et al., 2006). By decomposing trust into four dimensions, our findings reveal that only benevolence and predictability have a direct impact on commitment. Ability and integrity do not play equal roles in terms of member commitment. The lack of support for these latter relationships implies that a well-designed website and technical merit alone are insufficient in terms of forming a lasting relationship. Comparatively, members may develop a psychological attachment when e-vendors endeavor fully understand the needs of their members and provide reliable information in a timely manner. The results indicate that, in addition to focusing on the technical functions of the website, e-vendors should put more effort into providing online services. These findings supplement previous research by further clarifying the influence of trust on commitment. While ability, integrity, and predictability relate to member stickiness positively, the relationship between benevolence and returning frequency is not significant. As such, the impact of trust on stickiness is partially supported. This finding slightly differs from the earlier research finding (Li et al., 2006) and raises some interesting insights. In the context of virtual community, the website serves as a computer-mediated communication platform. While instant member support is important for lasting relationship, it is not a major issue to motivate returning intention compared with other issues such as website design, technical functions, and information quality. This finding implies that e-vendors may consider to continuously refining their websites to increase the member's returning intention. In contrast to previous study (Li et al., 2006), this research does not detect the relationship between commitment and stickiness. The research finding challenges the conventional view in common business practice where psychological bond is essential for retuning behavior. A possible explanation of the contradictory finding is that the virtual community is a relative simple environment where most members tend to share and acquire information only. As such, virtual members may perceive virtual community as communication platform and information channel only. In sum, this research contributes to the growing body of literature exploring the impact of trust on virtual community members, and provides a framework for illustrating the antecedents of trust as well as consequent behaviors. More importantly, this research is one of few that focuses on member behavior in transaction-based communities.