Autonomous Motivation and Self-Disclosure Intention: An ISS Perspective

Introduction

Providers of social networking services (SNSs) have put significant effort into developing measures to facilitate SNS users’ online and offline interactions in order to acquire valuable consumer/user information that can enable them to continue to expand their service reach and scope as well as the value of their services to their users (Qi et al., 2021; Sohaib, 2021; Uddin et al., 2021). The acquisition and management of SNS users’ location-related information is essential for achieving the objective above. This is because it allows businesses to have access to valuable real-time customer location information and act on it by planning for effective online and offline marketing programs (Koohikamali et al., 2015). Additionally, SNS users’ self-disclosure data can be one of the key sources of critical market information for private enterprises to develop effective strategies for facilitating their performance in customer relationship management (Hung et al., 2019), which is key to the success of startup companies in particular (Igwe et al., 2020). Nevertheless, SNS users have become increasingly cautious when sharing such information. This can attribute primarily to the increasing concerns related to the deliberate or unintentional misuse of personal information that may result in psychological or even physical harms to the original information contributors (Wang et al., 2017). There have been official regulations that empower the authorities to enforce electronic service (e-service) and mobile service (m-service) providers to disclose data breach events to their users and to hold the e-service providers responsible and be punishable for such events (Akter et al., 2020). However, the penalty is generally too small to enforce e-service providers to take more serious measures to secure the user data that they possess to better protect the privacy of their users (Akter et al., 2020). Consequently, the potential threat to e-service (e.g., SNS) users that is caused by their online self-disclosure behaviors remains a serious concern to those users.

Various studies have addressed the issues related to SNS users’ intentions to share personal information via their SNS from various theoretical perspectives, including personality traits (e.g. Lai and Yang, 2015), social cognitive theory (e.g. Kim et al., 2015), social capital theory (e.g. Chen & Sharma, 2013), social exchange theory (e.g. Liu et al., 2016; Loiacono, 2015), social media engagement theory (Di Gangi & Wasko, 2016), privacy economics (e.g. Steinfeld, 2015), and privacy calculus theory (e.g. Wang et al., 2017). Nevertheless, the issue of how SNS users’ autonomous motivations regarding self-disclosure influences their intention to disclose their personal information via an SNS is under-addressed in the literature. Nowadays, people socialize with others and exchange interesting personal information by heavily relying on online SNSs that favors highly autonomously driven behaviors (Paulin et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2016a). Based on the self-determination theory (SDT), when SNS users perceive that their decision of performing self-disclosure behaviors is volitional and within their control (i.e. being autonomous), they are likely to internalize and take responsibility and ownership of such behaviors (Pelletier et al. 2013). Consequently, they are likely to put more efforts into those behaviors because they experience a greater sense of volition and have more meaningful reasons for performing such behaviors again (Ferguson et al., 2015). Additionally, individual perceived autonomy is considered an important individual characteristic to understand people’s motivation to share personal information via SNSs and more studies are needed (Wang & Li, 2014).