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The purpose of the current study is to examine a social network site (SNS) users' overall satisfaction with SNS use in conjunction with their fan page visiting activities. We examined overall satisfaction with SNS usage from the lens of people's perceptions acquired from the use of sub-components of SNS.

The current study employed uncertainty reduction theory (URT) and general systems theory (GST) to examine antecedents affecting overall satisfaction with SNS use. Five constructs were adopted: interactive and passive uncertainty reduction strategies, perceived usefulness and continuance visiting behavior, satisfaction, and perceived functional benefits. Using a web-based survey, we analyzed 200 SNS users who follow at least one company's fan page, utilizing seemingly unrelated regression models to test hypotheses empirically.

Research findings reveal that uncertainty reduction strategies supported by URT are significantly associated with the perceived usefulness of a company's fan page. In turn, we found that perceived usefulness becomes a strong motivator to continuance visits to the fan page. The frequency of return visiting behaviors eventually accounts for overall satisfaction with SNS. Perceived functional benefits moderates the relationship between perceived usefulness and visiting behaviors significantly.

The current study contributes to information systems (IS), electronic communication, and their adjacent academic disciplines in providing evidence, including (1) the impact of uncertainty reduction strategies on continuance visiting behaviors in the SNS context, (2) SNS functionalities influencing the relationship between people's belief and behavior, and (3) theoretical significant perceptional link between a sub-component and a whole.

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.

In this study longitudinal data from 211 buyers who have usage experience of Xiaohongshu were collected to test the proposed model and hypotheses.

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.

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.

It is commonly observed in trainings that all trainees do not get satisfied with the performance of the trainer. The usual way to increase the satisfaction of trainees is a stress on improving task communication of the trainer. It is based on the assumption that effective task communication essentially fosters training effectiveness. This study aims to provide preliminary evidence that effective task communication can also obstruct training effectiveness besides promoting it. To achieve this objective, the authors hypothesized a dual-process model of training effectiveness based on uncertainty reduction theory.

This was a field study in which the authors collected time-lagged data from seven trainings. The trainings were designed to impart technical knowledge of multilevel analyses to professional social science researchers. Confirmatory factor analysis for ordinal indicators was used to test the measurement properties of the model and scales. Structural equation modeling for ordinal indicators was used to test hypotheses.

This study provided evidence of an overall positive effect of the trainer’s task communication on the trainee’s communication satisfaction. A complex mediation analysis also revealed the existence of two opposite psychological processes. While the first process transmitted the positive effect of task communication to communication satisfaction, the other process diminished this positive effect. Implications for the theory and practice of training are discussed.

Training scholars and practitioners universally believe that an effective task communication of trainers essentially promotes training effectiveness. This study has provided empirical evidence that this assumption is an incomplete picture of a complex reality that requires further investigation.

With the development of social media and Internet technology, many firms have started to use various crowdsourcing innovation platforms to operate their open innovation business modes. The purpose of this study is to explore how such platforms' assurance mechanisms enhance the effectiveness of crowdsourcing innovations and how to apply assurance mechanisms to handle different innovation tasks, thereby motivating more seekers to use crowdsourcing innovations.

The authors use a Python-based technology to collect the research data comprising 2,302 solvers and 8,390 trade records from zbj.com and apply statistical methods to test the postulated hypotheses.

The effectiveness of assurance mechanism is confirmed by its positive relationship with solver's behaviour, thereby improving seeker's retention behaviour. However, task complexity, task novelty and task professionalization have different moderating effects on the relationships among assurance mechanism, solver's (innovator's) behaviour and seeker's behaviour.

This study enriches the literature on crowdsourcing innovations and extends the application of uncertainty reduction theory to innovation research. It also makes the theoretical contribution that the assurance mechanism adopted by the platform has different impacts on user's behaviour depending on the task characteristics.

The findings provide guidance to the platform operator on how to design the assurance mechanism to match the innovation task and innovator's behaviour to reduce seeker's uncertainty, thereby facilitating the seeker's decision-making.

A particular value of this study lies in exploring the impact of the platform assurance mechanism of social media-based crowdsourcing innovations on innovator's behaviour, which may further improve seeker's behaviour, based on uncertainty reduction theory.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) involved in the production of natural essential oils can reduce market accessibility challenges by trading through electronic marketplaces (e-marketplaces). However, trust is a barrier that SMEs should overcome in order to successfully trade in e-marketplaces. The agricultural sector presents a unique challenge to the subject of trust and e-marketplaces. It is difficult for SMEs in the agricultural sector to provide the level of assurance of product quality that their buyers expect. Trust between buyers and sellers during the earliest stages of e-marketplace interaction can pave the way for future trust in a seller on an e-marketplace. Thus, this study uses the uncertainty reduction theory (URT) to investigate factors that could influence the initial trust and pave the way for future trust in a seller on e-marketplaces. This study assumes a qualitative research methodology in which a multiple-case study approach is adopted. The study focuses on SMEs that produce natural essential oils in South Africa. Open-ended interviews were conducted with companies involved in buying or selling natural essential oils in South Africa to determine the factors that influence their decision to buy or sell in an e-marketplace. Findings from data were used to inform the development of a model of trust in sellers of natural essential oils in e-marketplaces. The proposed model recommends trust factors that should be considered during the entry, personal, and exit phases of the URT. The model identifies common and unique trust factors that relate specifically to businesses trading natural essential oils on e-marketplaces. The study found that some SMEs face challenges in coming up with an effective model for selling agricultural produce on e-marketplaces. Hence, they often resort to face-to-face interaction when it comes to product inspection, especially when dealing with first-time buyers. However, this study presented measures put in place by other SMEs suggesting how such challenges could be addressed. Nevertheless, a lack of trust in technology remains a cause for concern to some SMEs selling natural essential oils.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential of readers' advisory (RA) in libraries to help immigrants with psychological and socio-cultural adaptation in a new country.

The data were empirically collected from a sample of Russian-speaking immigrant readers residing in the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario, Canada, by means of background surveys and in-depth interviews.

The RA interaction is not merely a conversation about leisure books; it is a powerful intercultural encounter that has the potential to raise the levels of intimacy and attraction between host and immigrant populations, break negative stereotypes, help to build shared networks and create favorable contacts, change intergroup attitudes, and improve readers' mastery of the second language and knowledge of a new country.

This article makes a contribution to three areas related to RA. It provides insight into the views and perceptions of RA by a selected group of readers; it gives voice to immigrant readers whose experiences with RA are particularly under-represented in the Library and Information Science literature; and it conceptualizes the RA interaction as an intercultural encounter, using the uncertainty reduction based theory of intercultural adaptation to frame the discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how quality dimensions in independently owned online brand communities influence purchase intentions via uncertainty reduction and the role of involvement.

This work validates the model and hypotheses through non-probabilistic sampling. The online questionnaire was made on the website of MySurvey and an invitation letter was posted to the forums. The respondents received the questionnaire items translated into Chinese. The final survey sample consisted of 235 respondents.

Empirical results confirm that as for independently owned online brand communities, their information quality and relationship quality are effective tools for influencing purchase intentions via uncertainty reduction. In addition, the authors demonstrate that involvement has a positively moderating influence on the relationship between uncertainty reduction and purchase intentions.

The current study moves beyond uncertainty reduction to demonstrate that information quality and relationship quality of forums influenced purchase intention via uncertainty reduction and the moderating variable such as involvement.

The purpose of this study is to understand customer experience (CX) in business-to-business (B2B) markets through the perspectives of buyer–seller dyads. This study aims to evaluate how customer journey, touchpoints and digital and social media (DSM) influence CX and offer avenues for sellers to align their efforts with buyers’ requirements to create and manage CX.

Integrating insights of practicing buyers and sellers in the pharmaceutical B2B industry, this study follows the phenomenological approach to understand their experience through their perspectives on the customer journey, touchpoints and DSM.

The findings of this study include convergence in the perspectives in journey stages, journey enablers, stakeholder involvement, touchpoint preference and DSM’s use. The study findings also include divergence in perspectives in the senior management engagement, journey enablers, selling center involvement, DSM purpose and usage of DSM platforms. These offer opportunities for sellers to align with buyer journey, touchpoints and DSM to create and manage CX.

Sellers in pharmaceutical B2B markets have been dependent on traditional knowledge to influence customer journey and touchpoints and the advent of DSM has enhanced the challenge. To avoid this confusion, sellers need to have clarity of customers’ expectations on the journey, touchpoints and DSM. This enables sellers to allocate their resources better to achieve the desired outcome in CX.

This first-of-its-kind study captured the convergence and divergence perspectives of pharmaceutical B2B buyer–seller dyads from the lens of the uncertainty reduction theory and social penetration theory. The study suggests opportunities for pharmaceutical sellers to create and manage CX.

Although work engagement has become an important topic in management, relatively little attention has been given to newcomers’ work engagement in the socialization literature. The purpose of this paper is to explain how newcomers’ work engagement can fluctuate during the first year of organizational entry and the role of organizational socialization in developing and maintaining high levels of newcomers’ work engagement.

A review of the socialization literature indicates that uncertainty reduction theory has been the basis of research on socialization tactics and newcomer information-seeking both of which function by providing newcomers with information to reduce uncertainty. Socialization resources theory is used to develop a new pathway to newcomer socialization which focuses on providing newcomers with resources during the first year of organizational entry and socialization.

The uncertainty reduction pathway to newcomer socialization is narrow and limited because it primarily focuses on minimizing and reducing the negative effects of job demands rather than on providing newcomers with resources that are necessary to facilitate work engagement and socialization.

Organizations can use newcomers’ work engagement maintenance curves to map and track fluctuations in newcomers’ work engagement during the first year of organizational entry and they can conduct an audit of socialization resources to determine what resources are required to develop and maintain high levels of newcomers’ work engagement.

This paper describes newcomer work engagement maintenance curves and explains how socialization resources can be used to develop and maintain high levels of newcomers’ work engagement. A model of a new pathway to newcomer socialization is developed in which socialization resources, personal resources, and job demands influence newcomers’ work engagement and socialization outcomes.

Uncertainty-identity theory serves as our guiding theoretical framework to explore subjective uncertainty, especially uncertainty about self and identity, and the ways in which communication within groups provides valuable social identity information to group members as a means to manage subjective uncertainty.

We review and synthesize research in communication science and social identity theory, specifically uncertainty-identity theory, to compare diverse understandings of uncertainty and the identity-shaping function of communication within groups.

Uncertainty inherent in dyadic interactions has received extensive attention in communication science. However, the identity-defining function of communication that flows within and between groups as a means to resolving uncertainty about subjectively important matters has received little attention in both social psychology and communication science.

We explore how communication that flows from in-group sources (e.g., leaders) serves to shape a shared reality and identity for group members while providing a framework for self-definition. We propose an agenda for future research that would benefit from an articulation of the importance of communication in the shaping and management of identity-uncertainty.

Uncertainty arousing rhetoric by influential in-group sources, such as leaders and the media can have serious implications for intergroup relations, as uncertain individuals seek distinctive and tight-knit groups and autocratic leaders under conditions of heightened uncertainty. The role that communication plays in shaping clear and distinct identities as a panacea for identity-uncertainty has implications for the intragroup normative structure of the group and for intergroup relations.