External Communities as Initiators of Organizational Change

Planned organizational change often conjures images of executive-driven initiatives, in which upper management identifies need for change, designs and executes change (Heyden et al., 2017). Scholars recognized that change can also emanate from lower levels of the organizational hierarchy, such as through issue selling, when employees identify concerns themselves (Dutton et al., 2001), or top management solicits ideas (Halbesleben et al., 2006).

Communities external to an organization can drive meaningful and radical organizational change (Germain et al., 2019; Özbilgin & Erbil, 2021), particularly through social movements. Such discussions focus mostly on social movements themselves, with organizational changes simply outcomes (e.g., Giorgi et al., 2017). That social movements come from communities outside the organization is important. Virtually no organizational literature addresses external communities compelling change within an organization. The closest the literature comes is in discussion of communities of practice (Brown & Duguid, 1991), but such communities do not typically initiate change. Yet communities of various types have often been quite successful at accomplishing change within organizations. By the term “community”, we are referring, from Krause and Montenegro’s (2017, p. 291) definition, to

Communities may exist within an organization, outside of it or be both internal and external to it. When members act in concert, sharing common ground, communities can have influence, (Alinsky, 1946), although impact depends on their shared bonds (Lichterman, 1995).

The power of communities for initiating organizational change is derived in part from their members’ psychological sense of community (PSOC), their “feeling of being part of an interdependent community, …a part of a larger dependable and stable structure that will meet key needs, and a sense of responsibility for the well-being of that community and its members” (Boyd & Nowell, 2014: 109). Communities per se do not affect successful organizational change; such change depends on experiences of the individual members gathered together. While a relatively nascent area of research in management, PSOC has deep roots in community psychology (e.g., Bothne & Keys, 2016; Jason et al., 2015; McMillan & Chavis, 1986; Sarason, 1974). It is beginning to make inroads in management studies (e.g., Livne-Tarandach & Jazaieri, 2020), and its role in initiating organizational change should be studied.

Through two examples, we demonstrate the power of communities for initiating meaningful and lasting change in organizations. In each case we show how a psychological sense of community is crucial for effecting change.

Social Movements, PSOC, and Organizational Change

Social movements usually arise from a collective with comparatively low power (Rao et al., 2003) and aim at addressing injustice members experience. Groups within the movement who bring the change forward are called social movement communities (McCarthy & Zald, 1977). Consistent with a PSOC, literature on social movement communities asserts the importance that the community meets members’ needs (Fine & Stoecker, 1985) and instills a common culture and collective sense of belonging (Melucci, 1984) such that there exists “mutual support among people who are connected to one another” (Staggenborg, 1998:182). Social movement, community-driven efforts have directly impacted the policies and practices of many organizations.

We need look no further than the Black Lives Matter (BLM) community of activists which began in 2013 as a response to police killings of Black people (Taylor, 2016). The BLM movement is one of the largest movements in U.S. history (Cohn & Quealy, 2020), due partially to its community-centeredness, with campaigns organized by the collective rather than a few leaders (Borden, 2020). During the year following the death of George Floyd, this community prompted police reform (Matusek & Gass, 2020) and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in companies worldwide (Johnson, 2021). For example, following a Tweet about BLM, retail giant Nordstrom announced its plan for promoting racial equality including the launch of a partnership with the National Urban League to improve the retailer's hiring and retaining of Black and other underrepresented groups (Edelson, 2020). The Quaker Oats Company, PepsiCo, Airbnb, Adidas, and many other companies also responded (Feloni & George, 2020).

A PSOC Within Product Loyalist Communities

Following intense competition and loss of market share to Pepsi, Coca-Cola senior executives launched New Coke, a reformulation of the ever-popular soft drink on April 23, 1985 (Oliver, 2013). Despite extensive market research, the introduction of New Coke was met with significant backlash from many Coca-Cola drinkers. The company received over 40,000 calls and letters from disappointed, angry customers within six weeks of its introduction (Ringold, 1988). Coca-Cola brand loyalists were particularly discontented (Cialdini & Rhoads, 2001): “I just thought this can't happen. It's almost like a death in the family” (Slater, 2000).

Coca-Cola loyalists joined together to create a community called Old Coke Drinkers of America (Barron, 1985) to express their dissatisfaction with changing their beloved beverage. Linked by their emotional connection - one of the key dimensions of a PSOC (McMillan & Chavis, 1986) - to old Coke and experiencing betrayal by Coca-Cola, Inc. the community rallied support from over 100,000 Coke loyalists (Barron, 1985). The community protested the change, held demonstrations, and filed at least one lawsuit against Coca-Cola (Morganthau et al., 1985). This personal investment from the members illustrates a strong PSOC amongst these loyalists, which amplified individual efforts through collective action. The loyalist community achieved its intended results, as Coca-Cola re-introduced its original Coke formula on July 11, 1985 (Oliver, 2013), just 79 days after introducing New Coke.

Implications and Proposed Future Directions

As these examples showcase, communities can be powerful forces for change. Further, we suggest a crucial mechanism enabling communities to harness this power is members’ psychological sense of community (Boyd & Nowell, 2014). In cohesive communities with a strong psychological sense of community, information flows well and change is likely to be powerfully supported or resisted. A community with less cohesion is likely to have a less unified reaction, and therefore be less impactful regarding change.

We offer several recommendations for developing research on impacts of communities and their PSOC that may affect organizational change. Given how little has been explored about this important topic, the topics we propose are aimed at setting the foundation for a new area.

First, clarifying the concepts involved is a necessity. Community can take several forms; it is important to consider these forms both comprehensively and differentially. Further, the construct psychological sense of community has been substantially defined, but there has not been explicit attention to various levels of PSOC that may be experienced in a community. Yet, as research on communities of practice (e.g., Brown & Duguid, 1991) shows, there may well be both central and peripheral members of a community, and they likely have different experiences of a PSOC. Further, centrality likely changes over time, with fluctuations in intensity of experience. Addressing these concepts requires appreciating their temporal as well as spatial dimensions. Finally, while we are focusing here on communities that are external to an organization, there are also communities internal to an organization (e.g., members of particular unions or ethnic groups), and understanding the roles and impacts of these, separately and together with the roles and impacts of external communities, is potentially important. These are only the beginnings of the types of changes that attention to the impacts of outside communities and the PSOC of their members on organizational change might stimulate.