The Impact of Teammates’ Online Reputations on Physicians’ Online Appointment Numbers: A Social Interdependency Perspective

Online medical team is an emerging online medical model in which patients can choose a doctor to register and consult. A doctor’s reputation cannot be ignored. It is worth studying how that online reputation affects the focal doctor’s appointment numbers on the online medical team. Based on the online reputation mechanism and social interdependence theory, this study empirically studied the impact of the focal doctor’s own reputation and other teammates’ reputation on his/her appointment numbers. Our data include 31,143 doctors from 6103 online expert teams of Guahao.com. The results indicate that for a leader doctor, his/her appointment numbers are not related to his/her own reputation, and there was an inverted U-shaped relationship with the ordinary doctors’ reputations on the team. For an ordinary doctor, his/her appointment numbers were positively correlated with his/her own reputation and positively correlated with his/her leader’s reputation and there was an inverted U-shaped relationship with the other ordinary doctors’ reputations. The research showed that there is a positive spillover effect on the team leader’s reputation. There are two relationships between team doctors: competition and cooperation. This study provides guidance for the leader to select team members and the ordinary doctor to select a team.