| dc.description.abstract | As the advancement of internet technology and the vigorous growth in virtual community, people can interact with others more easily through the online socializing platform. The current study intends to answer the question “how does the relational capital and motivation influence self-disclosure behavior?” Drawing on the social capital theory and motivation, we develop the multi-level research framework to discuss the relationships. The study assumes that relational capital will have positive impact on self-disclosure. Besides, the relational capital will influence self-disclosure through the mediating mechanism, motivation, and the relational capital will also reinforce the positive effect of the motivation on member disclosure behavior. Considering that the factors influencing self-disclosure may result from the factors in organizational-level and individual-level, the present study applied hierarchical linear modeling to examine the effect from different level. The result shows that the relational capital in organizational-level is positively related to self-disclosure, and the relational capital will affect self-disclosure through the partial mediating mechanism, motivation. Furthermore, the relational capital strengthens the positive influence of the need for fashion on individual self-disclosure behavior. This research makes four contributions as a whole. First of all, the study focuses on the relational capital built up in a virtual community to explore how it may affect the users. Secondly, the research probes into the mediating mechanism of motivation to realize how relational capital influences self-disclosure with this mechanism. In the meanwhile, the present study investigates multilevel relationship in moderating process of relational capital between motivations and self-disclosure behavior. Finally, in terms of the methodology, the current study uses hierarchical linear modeling to verify the effect of our research model so that we can accurately understand the impact of the variability of self-disclosure which is resulted from the organizational-level and individual-level. | en_US |