Research On The Effects Of Role Stress On The Lurkering In Social Media

With the development of information technology and the arrival of the Internet age, the social media such as virtual communities and social networking sites, are coming into our lives. More and more people begin to carry on many social activities in social media, which include creating content, consuming content and sharing content. Meantime, there are a lot of lurkers in the social media. The lurkers are the people who only consume content but do not contribute for some reason. The key to keep sustainable development of social media is to reduce lurkering, to inspire users to participate in social interaction and contribute content, and to establish a strong connection between people. Therefore, it is very important for social media management to analyze the reasons of lurkering. Through the analysis of the effect factors on the lurkering in Moments of WeChat from the perspective of role stress, we can help to reduce lurkering and improve the engagement of users, and help managers to manage social media effectively.Based on the framework of cognition-affection-conation and literature review including Role theory, Self-discrepancy theory, Lurkering theory, social anxiety and emotional exhaustion, this study comes up with the model of factors influencing lurkering intention in Moments of Wechat. It identifies role stress as cognitive factors from three dimensions:role conflict, role overload and role ambiguity. It identifies affective factors from two aspects:social anxiety and emotional exhaustion. The lurkering intention is identified as conative factor. And then we verify the model through questionnaires. Results of data analysis shows that role conflict and role overload have positive effects on social anxiety and emotional exhaustion at the same time, and role conflict has a positive effect on role overload. At the same time, role ambiguity has a negative effect on role conflict, but the effect of role ambiguity on social anxiety and emotional exhaustion is not significant. In addition, emotional exhaustion has a positive effect on lurkering intention. Social anxiety does not directly affect lurkering intention, but affect it by the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion completely. We also found that the group granularity has negative moderating effects in the relationship between role conflict and affective factors. In the end of the paper, we discuss the research results and provide some advices about social media management practices and future research.