Investigating the Mediating Role of Affective Commitment in a Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Environment

Because of the evolution of community supported collaborative learning (CSCL), the online community has become a necessary aspect of most companies and organizations. Previous research has indicated that employee community commitment is the fundamental function of an organization, which has proven to affect a person's teamwork performance. However, research focused on how the online community-supported collaborative virtual environment, such as enterprise social network (e.g., Yammer) or virtual working space (e.g., SUN's Wonderland) might alter community commitment to affect a person's teamwork self-efficacy is scant. The authors examine the mediating role of community commitment with emotional social support as an independent variable and teamwork performance as an output variable. World of Warcraft (WOW), a dynamic high-fidelity virtual environment that can support hundreds to thousands of people collaborating together, serves as the research platform in this study.The authors conducted hierarchical regression analysis to explore the causal-effect relationship among the factors of emotional social support, community commitment, and teamwork self-efficacy. In total, 558 current company employees selected from WOW participated in an online survey. The authors' findings showed that individual commitment positively influences teamwork self-efficacy. To increase individual commitment, the online community can provide a high level of emotional social support to members.