User involvement and user satisfaction with information-seeking activity

This paper presents the result of an empirical study that investigates user involvement and user satisfaction in the context of information-seeking activity. This study adopts the definition of user involvement as the psychological state of the importance and personal relevance that users attach to a given system. Following Celsi and Olson, intrinsic and situational motivators were considered as two antecedents of user involvement. These two types of motivator were treated as formative exogenous variables, while user involvement and user satisfaction were treated as reflective mediating endogenous variable and final endogenous variable, respectively. Five hypotheses were proposed, and all were supported by the data from a laboratory experiment. This paper also reports two other interesting findings. First, intrinsic motivators have a stronger positive effect on user involvement than situational motivators have. Second, situational motivators have a stronger positive effect on user satisfaction than intrinsic motivators have. The discussion part explains these interesting findings. © 2005 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved.