Title
Complementary or supplementary? Understanding users’ unfollowing behavior from the perspective of person-environment fit
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1016/j.ipm.2022.103035
Information Processing & Management
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Unfollowing behavior,Person-environment fit,Information overload,Social media fatigue,Expectation disconfirmation
Journal
59
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
5
0306-4573
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yiwen Zhang100.34
Yongqiang Sun225119.83
Junru Chen300.34
Nan Wang4523.46