ABSTRACT Online communities have suffered from their members’ intermittent, dormant, or nonexistent participation. We propose that prominence, which refers to the salience of community members’ psychological proximity to their community, differs from the engagement construct, which denotes a psychological dedication to behave prosaically toward other community members. Whereas engagement has been increasingly examined as a driver of online community behavior, the role of prominence has received a minimal amount of attention in the literature. Drawing on self-determination theory, we developed a framework that proposes the prominence construct as a phenomenon distinctive from engagement in its nature, formation, and behavioral outcomes. Our findings based on two studies indicate that the proposed model with prominence performs considerably better than the existing model with only engagement. Our conceptual model contributes to Information Systems research by laying a strong theoretical foundation to differentiate between the behavioral paths of the autonomous prominence construct and its controlled engagement counterpart.

中文翻译：

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突出和参与：在线社区中调节连续性和贡献的不同机制

摘要 在线社区因其成员间歇性、休眠性或不存在的参与而受到影响。我们提出，突出性是指社区成员在心理上与其社区的接近程度的显着性，不同于参与结构，后者表示对其他社区成员表现得平淡无奇的心理奉献。尽管越来越多地将参与视为在线社区行为的驱动因素，但在文献中，突出的作用却很少受到关注。借鉴自决理论，我们开发了一个框架，该框架提出突出结构是一种与参与的性质、形成和行为结果不同的现象。我们基于两项研究的发现表明，所提出的具有突出性的模型比仅具有参与度的现有模型性能要好得多。我们的概念模型通过奠定强大的理论基础来区分自主突出结构与其受控参与对应物的行为路径，从而为信息系统研究做出贡献。