Understanding affective commitment in social virtual worlds: The role of cultural tightness

Abstract

Understanding how cultural differences affect the formation of users’ affective commitment (ACO) to social virtual world (SVW) services is a critical but understudied issue. Using a novel, norm-based cultural approach, we introduce cultural tightness (CT) to capture cultural differences in users’ collective environment and postulate a model that investigates the contingent effects of CT on the relationships between ACO and its drivers. A two-level analysis of survey data gathered from 400 field users of an influential SVW service and secondary data of CT reveals that the effects of satisfaction, calculative commitment, and subjective norm on ACO are contingent on CT.