It becomes more and more important for marketers to understand why individuals adopt electronic word-ofmouth (e-WOM) on social networking sites. This paper aims to understand the social networking sites users eWOM adoption based on the attachment theory. Attachment avoidance, attachment anxiety, and their interaction effects are tested to understand the direct effect on e-WOM adoption. Moreover, the mediating effect of self-surveillance and social surveillance between attachment styles and e-WOM adoption has also evaluated. The results indicated that attachment avoidance has an adverse effect on e-WOM adoption; attachment anxiety and the interactive effect have a positive effect on e-WOM adoption. Self-surveillance and social surveillance have a mediating effect between two attachment dimensions (avoidance and anxiety) and e-WOM adoption, and the interaction of anxiety and avoidance mediated by social surveillance.

Introduction

Electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) is becoming an important marketing tool in the social media era. Consumers are accustomed to sharing information with others on social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook or Twitter. e-WOM is defined as “any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the Internet” (Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, Walsh, & Gremler, 2004, 39). Prior e-WOM related studies are classified into two levels: marketlevel analysis and individual-level analysis (Lee & Lee, 2009). The objective panel data (e.g., amount of consumer reviews) were used in the market-level analysis to measure the impact of e-WOM on product sales (Chen & Xie, 2005; Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006). Subjective personal factors (e.g., source credibility and consumer knowledge) were used in the individual-level analysis (Cheung, Luo, Sia, & Chen, 2009; Park & Kim, 2009). Individual-level analysis based e-WOM studies focus on four main elements in social communication: communicator (source), stimulus (content), receiver (audience), and response (main effect) (Cheung & Thadani, 2012). Communicators share or generate the contents for receivers, and receivers respond to the communicators.