The role of situational normality, swift guanxi, and perceived effectiveness of social commerce institutional mechanisms: an uncertainty reduction perspective
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-01-2022-0017 |
| Published date | 23 September 2022 |
| Date | 23 September 2022 |
| Pages | 2609-2632 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information systems,Data management systems,Knowledge management,Knowledge sharing,Management science & operations,Supply chain management,Supply chain information systems,Logistics,Quality management/systems |
| Author | Xiayu Chen,Jiawen Wang,Shaobo Wei |
The role of situational normality,
swift guanxi, and perceived
effectiveness of social commerce
institutional mechanisms:
an uncertainty reduction perspective
Xiayu Chen, Jiawen Wang and Shaobo Wei
School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China
Abstract
Purpose –The success of social commerce depends on the actual transactions of consumers, which will be
prevented in the presence of high uncertainty. However, attention paid to the uncertainty reduction strategies
in social commerce is limited, especially from a unified theoretical framework. Based on uncertainty reduction
theory (URT), this paper aims to investigate how three uncertainty reduction strategies (i.e. situational
normality, perceived effectiveness of social commerce institutional mechanisms (PESIM) and swift guanxi)
affect perceived uncertainty in social commerce, which in turn affects buyers’purchase intention and purchase
behavior. The moderating effects of PESIM on the relationships between the other two strategies and perceived
uncertainty were also tested.
Design/methodology/approach –In this study longitudinal data from 211 buyers who have usage
experience of Xiaohongshu were collected to test the proposed model and hypotheses.
Findings –Results show that the three uncertainty reduction strategies significantly reduce perceived
uncertainty. PESIM negatively moderates the relationships between situational normality and perceived
uncertainty, swift guanxi and perceived uncertainty. Perceived uncertainty is negatively related to purchase
intention. Purchase intention positively affects purchase behavior.
Originality/value –This study focuses on the role of uncertainty reduction mechanisms in promoting
purchase behavior through uncertainty reduction and sheds light on the relationships among situational
normality, PESIM, swift guanxi and perceived uncertainty based on URT, which have not been extensively
studied from a theoretical perspective in social commerce contexts. Besides, this study investigates the
moderating role of PESIM, which improves the understanding of the role of swift guanxi and situational
normality in reducing perceived uncertainty under the boundary condition of PESIM.
Keywords Situational normality, PESIM, Swift guanxi, Uncertainty reduction, Social commerce
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Social commerce is a combination of social media and e-commerce activities (Chen et al., 2021;
Hu et al., 2019). There are two major types of social commerce websites, one is social
networking sites that integrate commercial activities, and the other is traditional e-commerce
websites that incorporate social features (Zhang and Benyoucef, 2016). This study focuses on
the former one, which is also widely considered in prior studies. Social commerce has also
undergone rapid development in China in recent years. Approximately 78 min are spent a day
by a customer in China on social commerce (Liu et al., 2016). However, despite the
considerable benefits and the increasing number of users of social commerce, some platforms
are still facing profit difficulties due to the low purchase conversion rate and there is a call for
The role of
uncertainty
reduction
strategies
2609
This work is supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72271072,
71801069, 72071190, 71701194, 71921001), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
(JZ2021HGTB0072), and the Major Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(91846201).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0263-5577.htm
Received 10 January 2022
Revised 20 April 2022
8 August 2022
Accepted 12 August 2022
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 122 No. 12, 2022
pp. 2609-2632
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/IMDS-01-2022-0017
an improved understanding of how social commerce can gain success (Wang and Zhang,
2012;Wu et al., 2018).
The success of social commerce dep ends on the actual transactions of consumer s (Olbrich
and Holsing, 2014), which will be pre vented in the presence of high uncertai nty (Dimoka
et al.,2012;Hallikainen and Laukkanen, 2018). Perceived uncerta inty refers to the perception
of a buyer that the difficulty to assess the on line shopping circumstances accurately in the
presence of information asymmetry (Chen et al.,2021). Information asymmetry influences
buyers’information collection and purchase intenti ons (Bai et al., 2015). Uncertainty is
inherent in online commerce since all transacti ons have a certain degree of uncertainty about
their outcomes, and the physical separation exac erbates the uncertainty (Chen et al.,2021).
Compared with traditional e-commerce, th e presence of massive user-generated contents
(UGCs) in the social commerce community makes unce rtainty even more salient (Chen
et al., 2019;Hajli et al.,2017). Given the huge market potential of social commerce, users’
motivations to engage in social commerce activities and purchase products on so cial
commerce platforms have attracted the atte ntion of recent studies (Farivar et al.,2018).
However, two gaps exist in the current l iterature.
First, attention paid to the uncertainty reduction strategies in social commerce is limited,
and these strategies are not organized based on a unified theoretical framework (Bai et al.,
2015;Hwang et al., 2014;Wang et al., 2017). Prior researchers have explored how buyers’
perceived uncertainty can be mitigated in the e-commerce context (Pavlou et al., 2007;Tang
and Lin, 2019). The existing social commerce studies primarily depended on the traditional e-
commerce research conceptual framework, largely ignoring the unique social features of
social commerce. Applying previous research findings on e-commerce to social commerce is
problematic considering the unique social features of social commerce (Bai et al., 2015). Users
in traditional e-commerce primarily rely on system features such as user-friendly product
categorization, preference-based recommender systems and search engines to obtain
information (Chen and Shen, 2015). In contrast, social commerce possesses unique social
features in addition to commerce features (Bai et al., 2015). The social features of social
commerce include a social networking platform, users, the interaction among users and
information accumulated resulted from users’product information sharing behavior through
the social networking platform (Bai et al., 2015).For example, Xiaohongshu, one of the most
popular social commerce platforms in China, has built a community for users with similar
interests to interact and exchange information (Chen et al., 2021). Users can share their
experiences and feelings about products by posting notes and searching for or receiving
recommended contents that are related to their interests. These notes are allowed to add tags
that are linked to commodity display pages. When browsing posts and showing interest in
certain products, users can click on these tags to access detailed information. Moreover,
sellers have their homepages in the community. They post and forward notes about
themselves and set up a channel for users’interaction with them on their homepages. Hence,
research on how buyers’perceptions of uncertainty can be reduced through buyers’
information-seeking behaviors toward the social commerce platform, peer users and sellers in
the social commerce platform within a unified theoretical framework is needed.
Second, previous research has indicated that different strategies for uncertainty reduction
are not independent in digitally-enabled environments (Maruping et al., 2019). Prior research
has noted that the main difference between social commerce and traditional forms of
electronic commerce is that social commerce often involves a broader social context (Farivar
et al., 2018). Therefore, uncertainty reduction factors do not work in isolation, and their effects
on perceived uncertainty are more complex in the social commerce context. Further
exploration of the potential interaction effects of different uncertainty reduction strategies on
perceived uncertainty can improve our understanding of uncertainty reduction mechanisms
in social commerce. However, extant studies on the uncertainty reduction strategies in social
IMDS
122,12
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