Fairness and devotion go far: Integrating online justice and value co-creation in virtual communities

•We identify five distinct perceived online justice dimensions in virtual communities.•We examine both in- and extra-role value co-creation behavior in virtual communities.•Sense of virtual community mediates the influence of perceived online justice on value co-creation behavior.•Virtual community practitioners can develop, maintain, and sustain the virtual community by helping members form fairness perceptions during participation.

Although building long-term, successful virtual communities is important, rare studies have examined both in- and extra-role value co-creation behaviors from the perspective of social exchange theory and equity theory. Specially, we incorporate five different online justice perceptions into our model and examine the mediating role of “sense of virtual community” between these perceived online justice antecedents and both in- and extra-role online value co-creation behavior (reflected by knowledge contribution and online community citizenship behaviors, respectively). We empirically examine the model using data from 278 members of virtual communities. The results reveal that perceived online justice leads to value co-creation behavior through sense of virtual community. The findings elicit several implications for theory and practice.