Impact of online community interaction on value co-creation: Evidence from China

This paper explores the effect of online community interaction on value co-creation. The goal is to investigate internal factors influencing value co-creation through the SEM model and offer company managers effective management advice. This study investigates 485 customers in Xiaomi and Huawei online communities in China. An online questionnaire survey and convenient sampling are used, and a quantitative research method is adopted. The results of empirical analysis show that online community interaction, including human interaction (β = 0.141, p < 0.05) and human-computer interaction (β = 0.126, p < 0.05) positively affect value co-creation. Meanwhile, both human interaction (β = 0.300, p < 0.001) and human-computer interaction (β = 0.371, p < 0.001) significantly affect flow experience. Then flow experience (β = 0.689, p < 0.001) positively affects community identity and community identity (β = 0.488, p < 0.001) positively affects value co-creation. Yet, both human interaction (β = 0.051, p = 0.301) and human-computer interaction (β = 0.010, p = 0.858) do not significantly affect community identity. Flow experience (β = 0.032, p = 0.676) does not positively affect value co-creation. The results also show that neither flow experience alone nor community identity alone can play an intermediary role between online community interaction and value co-creation. Flow experience and community identity play a partial chain-intermediary effect between online community interaction and value co-creation.
Finally, online community interaction, on the one hand, directly affects value co-creation, on the other hand, it indirectly affects value co-creation via chain-mediating factors comprised of flow experience and community identity. This study provides a theoretical foundation for companies to use psychological factors to promote customers taking part in value co-creation to enhance enterprise competitiveness.
AcknowledgmentThe study is supported by the project: School of Business Administration Discipline Construction Funding Research Project, Guangxi University of Finance and Economics, China (No.12, 2016).