Beyond Adoption Intention: Online Communities and Member Motivation to Contribute Longitudinally

As online communities become increasingly relevant to business, it is critical to understand how to support contributors' motivation to contribute content longitudinally. In this article, we draw on existing literature on motivation and technology characteristics to conceptualize a model of longitudinal content contribution. We view longitudinal content contribution as a recursive process of interaction between contributors, other participants, and the IT artifacts of online communities. Our study has several important theoretical contributions: first, our study argues that different types of motivation exist and we need to understand how to support contributors' autonomous motivation; second, our study adds the time dimension to content contribution; third, our study clarifies the path from content contribution to motivation; forth, our study helps explain why some rewards can be detrimental to contributors' motivation. Future studies are needed to extend our model and test the propositions from our model.