How members’ commitment to an online knowledge community influences their usage behavior

Using organizational commitment theory, we proposed a model to characterize how community commitment affects the usage behavior of online knowledge community (OKC) members, and to depict the contextual antecedents of that commitment. We analyzed survey data from 255 users of an OKC and found that continuance, affective, and normative community commitment each had a prominent but different influence on the OKC members’ usage behavior; as contextual antecedents, the usability attribute had a significant effect on continuance community commitment, and community atmosphere played an important role in both affective and normative community commitment. These findings contribute to researchers’ understanding of the effect of community commitment on OKC members’ usage behavior. Managers of OKCs may use the findings to target contextual antecedents of commitment to encourage usage.