The rise of social media has created a new e-commerce platform called social commerce. In social commerce, e-vendors such as Amazon may integrate social media with their traditional e-commerce sites. Based on self-determination theory and social commerce literature, we develop a model illustrating how social commerce features may impact consumer behaviors and facilitate social commerce benefits from the extrinsic motivation perspective. We identify four types of extrinsic motivation including external motivation, introjected motivation, identified motivation, and integrated motivation; and we examine their influences on consumers’ intention to contribute social commerce information, which in turn leads to their subsequent behaviors and increases the perceived benefit of social commerce. We also consider the moderating effect of gender in the formulation of social commerce benefits. Based on longitudinal survey data from Amazon consumers, we find that 1) consumers’ external and identified motivation has a positive impact on intention to contribute social commerce information; 2) consumers’ intention is positively associated with their future behaviors, which in turn facilitate their perceptions of social commerce benefits; and 3) gender moderates the impact of behavior on social commerce benefits.

Introduction

The intersection of social media and traditional e-commerce has given the rise of a new world, social commerce. As a new form of ecommerce, social commerce facilitates new channels for consumers to improve not only their purchase decisions but also shopping experiences via its primary features, such as user interactions and user-generated content (e.g., Alalwan, Rana, Dwivedi, & Algharabat, 2017; Dwivedi, Kapoor, & Chen, 2015; Hajli, 2015; Kapoor et al., 2018; Kim & Kim, 2018; Liang, Ho, Li, & Turban, 2011; Ng, 2013; Zhang, Guo, Hu, & Liu, 2017). Social commerce offers an innovative channel for enterprises to build brand loyalty and promote sales through customer engagement in social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook (Lee, Lee, & Oh, 2015; Zheng, Cheung, Lee, & Liang, 2015). Social commerce thus provides a social media-based approach for business practices and has gained increasing attention from researchers. Therefore, capturing the essence of consumer behaviors in social commerce is essential for both researchers and practitioners to gain insights into the implementation of social commerce (Zhang & Benyoucef, 2016). Consumer behaviors may vary depending on specific social commerce scenarios, including adding commercial features into social media and/or adding social media features into traditional e-commerce (Huang & Benyoucef, 2013; Liang et al., 2011; Lin, Li, & Wang, 2017; Zhang & Benyoucef, 2016).

مقاله سال 2016

 مجله تحقیقات بازاریابی – Journal of Business Research

Motivation has been broadly characterized as one of the more powerful predictors of human behavior—a key predictor of performance for practitioners and a crucial element in creating theories of behavior for theorists (Steers, Mowday, & Shapiro, 2004). Thus, it is not surprising that motivation appears in a variety of discipline journals (e.g., Davis, Bagozzi, & Warshaw, 1992; Fitzmaurice, 2005; Levin & Hansen, 2008; Miao & Evans, 2007), nor that business researchers and managers have great interest in understanding individuals’ motivation to use social media and mobile technologies on behalf of businesses (e.g., Leftheriotis & Giannakos, 2014; Levin, Hansen, & Laverie, 2012).

While most research studies and textbooks continue to treat motivation as a bi-dimensional construct (comprised of extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation), a few studies have suggested a third form of motivation—apathetic motivation (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2002; Levin et al., 2012; Vallerand, Fortier, & Guay, 1997). Apathetic motivation is defined as a lack of interest or enthusiasm in a particular task or topic. Reasons for its presence could include lack of confidence in the ability to perform a task and/or lack of belief in materialization of the desired outcomes. We find it fascinating that there appears to be a prevailing view in research that a “lack of interest” is treated as equivalent to a “lack of motivation” in the conceptual discussion, scaling, and analysis in most research studies that mention it. Verily, we disagree with that treatment. We argue that apathetic motivation is not simply the absence of other motivations. Rather, we posit that the lack of interest or enthusiasm is independent of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Indeed, we propose that what many have considered to be a single phenomenon (compounding motivations and amotivations) is actually multiple distinct phenomena, as specified in the next paragraph.

Consequently, the purpose of this research is to outline and investigate the hypothesis that apathetic motivation can exist simultaneously with extrinsic motivation and/or intrinsic motivation—with the goal of improving our understanding of why some intrinsically or extrinsically motivated workers do not act on those motivations in the important context of using social media for businesses. Adopting that goal, the contribution of this article to the existing motivation literature is the first empirical investigation containing joint examination of (1) apathetic motivation’s direct contribution to behavioral intention independent of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations’ contributions; (2) potential interactions of apathetic motivation with (a) extrinsic or intrinsic motivation on intention to use or (b) intention to use on actual usage or outcomes; and (3) interactions between intention to use social media technologies based on the combined motivations and employee job roles (i.e., moderated moderation).