Complementary or supplementary? Understanding users’ unfollowing behavior from the perspective of person-environment fit

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Abstract

The loss of followers poses a severe threat to the development of microblogging platforms and bloggers. However, the reasons behind users’ unfollowing behavior remain unclear. Drawing on the person-environment fit framework, we examined how different types of person-environment misfits affect users’ unfollowing intention and the relationship between these misfits. We collected the data to test the research model from 305 Weibo users via an online survey. The results suggest that from the perspective of complementary misfit, information overload increases social media fatigue, and information irrelevance increases followers’ expectation disconfirmation. From the perspective of supplementary misfit, perceived value dissimilarity positively affects followers’ fatigue and disconfirmation. These negative psychological states consequently lead to followers’ unfollowing intention. Furthermore, our results revealed the positive effects of perceived value dissimilarity on information overload and information irrelevance. We also discuss the theoretical contributions and practical implications of this study.

Introduction

Microblog not only provides users with a channel for information acquisition but also empowers them to stop receiving unwanted information and unilaterally dissolve subscribed relationships. This social media platform enables users to automatically receive updates from the bloggers once they start following them. They may end the relationship if the actual experience of following certain bloggers is not always as good as users initially expected. We regard the severance of this relationship as unfollowing behavior, manifested by users removing the blogger from their following list on Microblog (Kwak et al., 2011; Tang & Chen, 2020). Since bloggers who have large numbers of followers are recognized as being more popular and influential on Microblog (Zhang et al., 2014), a decline in the number of followers is a huge loss. Therefore, to maximize the maintenance of existing fans, it is vital for bloggers to explore the reasons behind individuals’ decisions to stop following them.

Unfollowing on Microblog has been viewed as a special type of information system (IS) discontinuance because its behavioral manifestation is discontinuing to receive information from bloggers (Liang & Fu, 2017) and dissolving the one-way relationship with them (Kwak et al., 2011). With that in mind, this research further unfolds their similarities in mechanisms by drawing upon the person-environment (P-E) fit theory. According to this theory that depicts how stress occurs from a mismatch between individuals and the environment (Edwards et al., 1998), we surmise users treat unfollowing as a kind of discontinuous usage strategy to respond to stress from the changing dynamic that arises when the attributes of followers and the targeted bloggers end up in a state of misfit (Tang et al., 2019). It is noted that the P-E fit has long been divided into complementary and supplementary fit (Guan et al., 2021; Kristof, 1996). Not only complementary fit that reflects the equilibrium between attributes of individuals and the target environment, which is the information flow created by bloggers being followed, but also supplementary fit that captures the congruence between characteristics of individuals and the environment has been verified to be essential for user participation (Li & Fang, 2021; Pee & Min, 2017; Shen et al., 2016). Therefore, our research objective is to explore the reasons behind unfollowing behavior on Microblog from perspectives of both complementary fit and supplementary fit.

However, current studies on discontinuance behavior in light of P-E fit are weak in two aspects. First, regarding complementary fit, the literature has been confined to considering the single role of demands-abilities fit such as perceived overload (Cao et al., 2021), perceive intrusiveness (Chen et al., 2019), and system complexity (Lee et al., 2016). Scant attention has been devoted to the possibility that environmental supplies fail to meet individuals’ demands. P-E fit claims that whatever the direction of complementary misfit between personal and environmental attributes is, it will lead to negative responses among individuals (van Vianen, 2018). On the evidence of undesirable outcomes in technology use derived from the discrepancies between needs and supplies (Guo et al., 2020; Shen et al., 2018; Stich et al., 2019), it is expected that the imbalance between followers’ information needs and bloggers’ supplies also affect followers’ willingness to continue to follow the bloggers. Therefore, the first research question for this study is as follows:

RQ1: How do complementary misfits from both demands-abilities and needs-supplies perspectives influence followers’ unfollowing intention on Microblog?

Second, complementary and supplementary fits have not been simultaneously discussed when discovering the mechanism of discontinuance behavior. Except for the significant effect of complementary fit stated above, supplementary fit also plays an indispensable role in influencing the decision-making of IS usage behaviors (Li & Fang, 2021; Shen et al., 2016). Users who possess different values from other members of Microblog may experience cognitive dissonance (Cable & Edwards, 2004), which can prevent them from continuing to use Microblog. It is necessary to integrate the different effects of two types of misfits to gain a comprehensive understanding of users’ unfollowing intention on Microblog.

Furthermore, previous studies have been restricted to concentrating on the separate effect of each misfit on social media (Han & Myers, 2018; Xiao & Mou, 2019), while the mechanism of intercorrelations between distinct types of P-E misfits regarding IS discontinuance remains unexamined. Research in the social media context is still in its infancy, although scholars have tried to unveil the effects of interrelationships between complementary and supplementary fit on job satisfaction (Yu, 2016) and turnover (Chi et al., 2020) under organizational circumstances. Those studies in the social media context, nonetheless, may support this proposal because supplementary fit leads individuals to gain more supportive resources (Liu et al., 2016), and incongruence between individuals and networks can accelerate individuals’ vulnerability to cope with demands (Buglass et al., 2016). In a similar vein, we presume that interrelationships between complementary and supplementary fit can influence the extent of satisfaction with the experience of following bloggers, and consequently, the choice of whether to continue following. Thus, the second research question is presented below.

RQ2: How does supplementary fit influence users’ unfollowing intention on Microblog?

This study tends to understand the impacts of complementary and supplementary misfits on unfollowing behavior on Microblog from the information acquisition perspective (Liang & Fu, 2017). We assume users attend more to the information environment built by bloggers than to the asymmetric social connections with bloggers since a primary characteristic of the relationship created through following bloggers is its one-way, rather than reciprocal, nature (Kwak et al., 2011). For bloggers, especially those with large fan bases, instead of a real sense of a social relationship with an individual follower, they perceive the existence of followers from the number of likes, comments, or retweets. In this research, we identify information overload and information irrelevance as two dimensions of complementary misfit. Information overload describes a state where too much information offered by social networking services (SNSs) exceeds users’ information processing capabilities, while information irrelevance indicates that information from SNSs fails to satisfy their needs. Meanwhile, we regard value dissimilarity as supplementary misfit since it refers to the degree of value incongruence, which typically reflects supplementary misfit (Cable & Edwards, 2004).

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The next section reviews related literature on unfollowing behavior, P-E fit theory, and expectation disconfirmation theory. Section 3 presents our research model and hypotheses. In Section 4, we explain our method and data collection procedure. Then, we address the outcomes of data analysis in Section 5. Finally, we summarize the key findings and the study's theoretical and practical implications.

Section snippets

Unfollowing behavior on Microblog

Unfollowing behavior on Microblog presents as followers’ decision to remove bloggers’ accounts from their follower list so that updates from these bloggers will not appear on their microblog homepage (Tang & Chen, 2020). Most studies related to unfollowing behavior regard it as a unique type of discontinuance behavior because in terms of behavioral performance, it manifests as social media discontinuance to stop adopting the information source (Maier et al., 2015; Shokouhyar et al., 2018) or to

Research model and hypothesis development

Upon employing the P-E fit theory, we propose the mechanisms through which complementary and supplementary fit impact users’ unfollowing behavior on Microblog. Specifically, we assume that information overload and information irrelevance—which signal two patterns of complementary fit—generate the intention to unfollow by evoking different subjective perceptions, such as social media fatigue and expectation disconfirmation. Perceived value dissimilarity is applied to represent supplementary

Measurement

We developed the measurement for each construct from items that have been well validated in the literature to fit the microblog context. Specifically, we assessed information overload using items from Zhang et al. (2016). We took the items to measure information irrelevance from Lee et al. (2016) and Guo et al. (2020). We measured perceived value dissimilarity with items from Pan et al. (2014). We adopted four items from Guo et al. (2020) to gauge social media fatigue. The expectation

Data analysis

We employed the partial least squares (PLS) approach to validate our proposed research model. PLS is more prediction-oriented (Teo et al., 2003) and has gained increasing popularity in IS research because it does not rely on the condition of the normal distribution of data and can handle a small sample size (Chang, 2013). Therefore, PLS is an appropriate statistical method for our study. Specifically, we used Smart PLS 3.0 to verify our research model in two steps. The first step tested the

Discussion of the findings

This research helps to broaden the understanding of unfollowing behavior by unearthing the mechanisms through which P-E misfit influences users’ unfollowing intention on Microblog. Our results reveal that both complementary and supplementary misfits can motivate individuals’ unfollowing intention through social media fatigue and expectation disconfirmation. We address several major findings below.

First, our findings show that different types of complementary misfits caused different negative

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yiwen Zhang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing. Yongqiang Sun: Conceptualization, Supervision, Methodology, Writing – review & editing. Junru Chen: Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing – original draft. Nan Wang: Conceptualization, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing.

Acknowledgement

The work described in this paper was partially supported by the grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 71904149, 71974148, 71921002), and the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education, China (Project 17YJC630157).

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