In recent years, the mushrooming development of Online Communities (OCs) has ushered a new paradigm ofresearch for organizational sustainability in IS. In essence, the growth and survival of an online community reliespredominantly on the continuous participation of its members. Given that the emergence of OCs may decay or evendiminish due to the lack of consistent involvement of members, it is of paramount importance to fathom how toretain and entice members of OCs in terms of their continuous participation in the online platform. Extant studieshave focused mostly on personal belief constructs and subjective norm constructs to study users’ continuousbehavior. However, the important role of social situations has not been sufficiently explored and investigated in IS,particularly in the emerging context of OCs. Drawing on the Triandis model, this study proposes a research modelincorporating social situations as the moderator on the continuance participation intention in OCs. We collected datafrom two large OCs to examine whether congruence exists between situation perceptions and situation reactions.The empirical results show that social situations play an important role in determining the strength of therelationships between affect, social factors, and perceived consequences and the continuance intention in OCs.