Exploring Social Influence on Customer Engagement: A Pilot Study on the Effects of Social Learning, Social Comparison, and Normative Influence

Abstract

Contemporary socio-technical environments hold a great potential to drive a positive influence on the behaviors and attitudes of individuals. Drawing upon social cognitive theory (SCT) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB), this paper explores how and to what extent persuasive social influence features (namely, social learning (SL), social comparison (SC), and normative influence (NI)) alter customer behavior toward engagement in feedback sharing. A theory-driven research model was composed and then analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Based on a pilot experimental study involving 69 Twitter users, the authors indicate that behavioral intention (BI) to engage in feedback sharing is partially explained by the perceived persuasiveness (PP) of a system, which is partly explained by means of NI, which in turn is partly explained by means of SC. On top of that, SL plays an important role in explaining and influencing all of the abovementioned constructs.