Abstract
This article introduces a new construct to the field of management called Psychological Sense of Community (PSOC). This is important because management scholars are calling for the creation of communities in organizations in an environment that lacks appropriate construct development. The aims of this article are threefold: (a) develop a working definition of PSOC via a review of the extant literature on PSOC from other disciplines with the goal of translating it into the domain of management, (b) synthesize findings from parallel literatures on the outcomes of PSOC with an eye toward exploring the relevance of such outcomes in management contexts, and (c) assess the value of PSOC as it relates to its uniqueness in relation to other prominent management constructs and its scope of applicability in a variety of management inquiry areas.
Keywords
Recent claims in the management literature promote a concern that building a sense of community in organizations is important. Sounding the call are Mintzberg (2009) and Block (2008) who strongly urge organizations to become communities for the sake of corporate social responsibility and the increased prosperity that seems to bring to many stakeholders. For example, Mintzberg (2009) argues that the most recent economic crisis found fertile ground in contemporary organizations characterized by detached (heroic) leadership and cultures that celebrate and reward short-term success regardless of long-term consequences. He proposed that the fields of management and leadership need to rebuild companies as communities for the long-term success of the firm. In a related way, the field of management as a whole promoted this call at the 2010 Academy of Management’s Annual Meeting titled “Dare to Care: Passion and Compassion in Management Practice and Research.” The theme emphasized the importance of connectedness, mutual concern, and community toward the creation of ethical and successful organizations.
Yet, despite this growing interest in understanding organizations as communities, as well as their role within communities, the current field of management has few theoretical constructs and frameworks for advancing a program of research in this area. Our review of the management literature suggests a growing consensus that community-oriented constructs are needed (Barczak, Smith, & Wilemon, 1987; Brytting & Trollestad, 2000; Dessler, 1999; McBride, 2006; Milliman, Czaplewski, & Ferguson, 2003; Rego & Cunha, 2007; Rego, Cunha, & Souto, 2007; Rowley, Kupiec-Teaham, & Leeming, 2007), but the field has yet to tap into the wealth of theoretical and empirical knowledge available in parallel literatures to propel this area of inquiry forward. Instead, scholars appear to be using the term community without clearly identifying its properties or meanings to justify its presence in the domain of management.
Drawing from the sister disciplines of community psychology, sociology, and public health, this article introduces a concept called psychological sense of community (PSOC) to the field of management and examines its translation and applicability in management contexts. PSOC has been recognized as a construct of import across a wide variety of disciplines including education, technology, architectural design, public health, social work, community development, and urban planning. 1 In light of growing interest in the management literature toward exploring organizations as a community context, it is timely to examine the conceptual relevance of constructs like PSOC to the field of management.
Accordingly, the aims of this article are threefold: (a) develop a working definition of PSOC via a review of the extant literature on PSOC from other disciplines with the goal of translating it into the domain of management, (b) synthesize findings from parallel literatures on the outcomes of PSOC with an eye toward exploring the relevance of such outcomes in management contexts, and (c) assess the value of PSOC as it relates to its uniqueness in relation to other prominent management constructs and its scope of applicability in a variety of management inquiry areas.
The Construct Development of PSOC Across Disciplines
PSOC is a construct that is rooted in the social and behavioral sciences. A review of this literature reveals that it has been investigated in a variety of broad contextual settings including religious communities (Miers & Fisher, 2002), immigrant communities (Sonn, 2002), student communities (Pretty, 1990), internet communities (Obst, Zinkiewicz, & Smith, 2002), and residential and geographic communities (Brodsky, O’Campo, & Aronson, 1999; Perkins, Florin, Rich, Wandersman, & Chavis, 1990). In addition, PSOC has been found to predict key outcomes of interest like psychological well-being (Davidson & Cotter, 1991; Peterson, Speer, & McMillan, 2008; Pretty, Conroy, Dugay, Fowler, & Williams, 1996; Prezza & Pacilli, 2007), and prosocial behaviors like community engagement, political participation, and civic involvement (Albanesi, Cicognani, & Zani, 2007; Brodsky et al., 1999, Hughey, Speer, & Peterson, 1999; Peterson et al., 2008; Prezza, Pacilli, Barbaranelli, & Zampatti, 2009). Its related works have been published in a variety of academic journals including the Journal of Community Psychology, the American Journal of Community Psychology, the Journal of Health Education and Behavior, Educational Technology and Society, and Environment and Behavior, to name a few.
Sarason (1974) was one of the first to articulate a PSOC construct and is regarded as its pioneer. He argued that individuals should be studied in terms of their relationships to the larger social collectives within which they are embedded. He broadly described PSOC as
the perception of similarity to others, an acknowledged interdependence with others, a willingness to maintain this interdependence by giving to or doing for others what one expects from them, and the feeling that one is part of a larger dependable and stable structure. (p. 157)
The contributions of Sarason and others were empirically assessed as early as the late 1970s (Doolittle & MacDonald, 1978; Glynn, 1981; Riger & Lavarkas, 1981), but a consistent framework for the concept was not unveiled until McMillan and Chavis (1986) offered a four-factor model based on the literature of the day and a working paper that McMillan (1976) had previously developed to advance the definition of the concept. They argued that PSOC is “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together” (p. 9).
According to the conceptualization offered by McMillan and Chavis (1986), PSOC is a multidimensional construct comprising four central components:
(a) Membership—a feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness; (b) Influence—a sense of mattering, of making a difference to a group, and of the group mattering to its members; (c) Integration and fulfillment of needs—a feeling that members’ needs will be met by the resources received through their membership in the group; and (d) Shared emotional connection—the commitment and belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together, and similar experiences. (p. 9)
The most commonly used measures of PSOC, the Sense of Community Index (Perkins et al., 1990) and the Brief Sense of Community Scale (BSCS; Peterson et al., 2008) use the McMillan and Chavis (1986) conceptual framework as their referent.
Recent work by Nowell and Boyd (2010) in the field of community psychology, sought to further advance the conceptual development of the construct by providing an underlying theoretical framework for PSOC. In an effort to provide a more robust theoretical lens to inform construct and measurement development, they highlighted that dominant conceptualizations of PSOC have drawn primarily from needs-based theories that characterize one’s psychological connection to a community. The community in a needs-based framework is viewed as a potential resource for meeting physiological or psychological needs of the individual. Their work showed that McMillan and Chavis’ (1986) four dimensions (membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection) as they have been operationalized to date, principally concern whether a community is serving to meet key psychosocial needs such as the need for affiliation (nAffill), need for power (nPwr), need for achievement (Nach; McClelland, 1961), and need for affection (Schutz, 1958). Within this logic, when the community is perceived to meet a variety of psychological and physiological needs, members will experience greater social well-being. They will also be more likely to engage in a variety of important procommunity-type behaviors such as maintaining residence in the community, participating in political activities, and exhibiting greater community involvement.
Moreover, Nowell and Boyd (2010) advanced the theoretical underpinnings of PSOC by proposing that very little consideration has been given to PSOC that is rooted—not in expectations of personal gain—but rather in a sense of personal responsibility to the community to which one is a member. In other words, PSOC is too often defined by what one gets from their community compared with a sense of responsibility to advance the health and well-being of a community and its members. In this way, PSOC as a resource struggles to account for situations in which people act in ways that incur personal costs and risk in service to their communities out of a sense of responsibility (Knoke & Wright-Isak, 1982; March & Olsen, 1989; Perry, 2000).
The basic premise of PSOC as responsibility is grounded in what March and Olsen (1989) referred to as the logic of appropriateness. This logic argues that individuals develop personal values, norms, ideals, and beliefs about what is appropriate within a given social context through exposure to and embeddedness within various institutions (e.g., families, churches, schools, neighborhoods, professional associations, social groups). These personal belief systems subsequently serve to guide behavior as individuals seek psychological coherence between (a) what type of situation they think this is, (b) what kind of person they think they are, and (c) how a person like them should act in this type of situation (March & Olsen, 1989). Applied to PSOC, this logic provides the foundation for understanding PSOC as inclusive of a sense of responsibility for the well-being of a community and the members within it. This psychological sense of responsibility is born out of an interaction between the individual’s perception of the community context and their personal ideology concerning what one’s relationship to such a community should be. These ideas have parallels in the emerging literature on organizational virtuousness. As described by Cameron, Bright, and Caza (2004), organizational virtuousness refers to organizational contexts where “good” habits, desires, and actions are practiced, supported, nourished, disseminated, and perpetuated at the individual and collective levels of the organization.
PSOC in Organizations: A Working Definition
If we were to conceptualize organizations as social collectives that can be experienced as a community by its members, what would a definition of PSOC in organizations look like? Collectively, extant literature suggests PSOC to be a complex multidimensional construct that encompasses an individual’s belief that a given community serves as a personal resource for fulfilling key psychological and physical needs, as well as a feeling of responsibility for the well-being of that community. The translation of such a construct to an organizational context is reasonably straightforward. Drawing most heavily from the definition of McMillan & Chavis (1986) while incorporating elements of Sarason (1974) and Nowell and Boyd (2010), we propose a working definition of PSOC as “a member’s feeling of being part of an interdependent community, a feeling that one is 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.” 2
If organizations are in fact theoretically relevant community settings as has been suggested (Brodsky & Marx, 2001; Cantano, Pretty, Southwell, & Cole, 1993; Mahan, 2000; Pretty & McCarthy, 1991; Pretty, McCarthy, & Catano, 1992), it would follow that the experience of community within organizations would have theoretically parallel dimensions to that of other community contexts. To examine this proposition, we turn our attention to the plausible translation and relevance of the PSOC dimensions of membership, influence, needs fulfillment, shared emotional connection, and responsibility to organizational contexts.
Membership: A feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness
In community contexts, membership refers to a feeling of belonging or sharing personal relatedness to a neighborhood block, a city or town, a state, or larger community collective. Applied to organizational contexts, membership would refer to feelings of belonging and personal relatedness to specific social collectives such as a work unit or team, a department or division, or a whole organization.
Influence: A sense of mattering, of making a difference to a group, and of the group mattering to its members
In community settings, influence means that residents believe they can express their voice in determining what goes on in the community, and have the capability of influencing each other to express their voice in shaping the community. In organizational contexts, influence would translate to employee and manager perceptions about the extent to which they are able to express their opinions in ways that shape decision making and organizational plans and actions.
Integration and fulfillment of needs: A feeling that member’s needs will be met by the resources received through their membership in the group
In community contexts, integration and fulfillment of needs means that citizens view their community as a setting that helps them to meet direct physiological and psychological needs. For example, residents might believe that their community fulfills safety and social needs. Need fulfillment is equally relevant in organizational settings. This would translate in terms of the degree to which employees view that a variety of physiological and psychological needs are being fulfilled by receiving pay, benefits, training, safety, and recognition.
Shared emotional connection: A belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together, and similar experiences
In community settings, members feel shared emotional connections by being from the same community and going through shared experiences with each other. For example, residents share emotional connections via their experiences in community parks, restaurants, schools, sporting events and successes, and handling crises like floods, fire, and many types of events that affect their community. Similarly, in organizational contexts, employees feel shared emotional connections as they work together on projects, collectively experience up and down economies, share the prospects of company growth together, and experience times of personal joy and sadness with each other.
Responsibility: A commitment to the well-being of the group and its individual members
In community settings, members can feel a sense of responsibility for their neighbors and for the community as a whole. For example, residents can feel committed to helping others in times of need with food, digging their car out of a snow bank, and emotional support when their children go off to college. In addition, residents feel responsibility for maintaining their community business presence, little league fields, school curriculum, and the quality of access to green spaces. In organizational settings, employees may feel a sense of responsibility to coworkers in the form of project help, advice and counseling, and emotional support. As well, employees may feel responsible for the success and well-being of the organization as a whole.
PSOC in Organizations: Unique or Redundant?
The analysis so far suggests the core dimensions of PSOC identified in other literatures have clear conceptual relevance to organizational contexts. Next, we turn our attention to its distinctiveness in relation to other key constructs in the field of management. The contribution of a new construct to a field can be evaluated according to the scale and scope of its uniqueness and relevance (Klein, Molloy, & Brinsfield, 2012). At one end of the continuum, a new construct may be relatively redundant with existing constructs, and at the other end, the new construct may contribute a unique perspective having wide-ranging implications. The analysis that follows examines whether PSOC is a distinct and unique concept in the field of management. In a later section, we explore the relevance of PSOC to outcomes of concern to management by reviewing the empirical literature on the outcomes of PSOC and discussing the implications of these findings for management areas of inquiry.
To examine whether PSOC is unique and has utility for the field of management, we compare and contrast PSOC to five potentially related management constructs: team cohesion, organizational identity, organizational commitment, psychological contracts, and social capital. Our decision to focus on these five constructs is based on an extensive review of the management literature in which we attempted to identify constructs that shared definitional or theoretical commonalities with PSOC. Based on this literature review and feedback from our peers, we have concluded that these constructs stand out as ones that are most similar to PSOC, and provide the best litmus test for the utility of PSOC as a unique construct. We analyze the five constructs in relation to PSOC via five critical criteria: the definition of the construct, focus of the concept, dimensions of the concept, level of analysis, and its referent (see Table 1). In Table 1, a summary of the shared characteristics as well as unique properties of PSOC relative to each of the five constructs we reviewed is provided.
Analysis of PSOC With Other Constructs.
Note. PSOC = psychological sense of community.
Team Cohesion
The first construct we present is team cohesion. Team cohesion has been described as, “the resultant of all the forces which are acting on the members to stay in a group” (Festinger, 1950, p. 274), and “a dynamic process which is reflected in the tendency for a group to stick together and remain united in the pursuit of its goals and objectives” (Carron, 1982, p. 124). In a meta-analytic study, Beal, Cohen, Burke, and McLendon (2003) describe the construct of team cohesion as inclusive of three dimensions: (a) interpersonal attraction, (b) commitment to the task, and (c) group pride.
Comparison of PSOC to team cohesion suggests that they are complementary but distinct concepts. Relating to each other, both constructs have subscales that speak to a sense of identification within—and attraction to—a given group. Team cohesion has a subscale in Interpersonal Attraction, while PSOC has Membership and Shared Emotional Connection. Although they are not measuring identical constructs, there appears to be a similar intent to measure “connectedness” within a collective context.
However, PSOC is a distinct construct from team cohesion. First and foremost, PSOC differs from team cohesion in its level of analysis. Whereas team cohesion is explicitly an attribute of a team or unit, PSOC is an individual-level construct that focuses on a person’s psychological sense of connection to a community of actors. This level of analysis distinction holds similarly true for related culture-based constructs such as organizational collectivism (e.g., Chatman and Barsade, 1995) and Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s (1983) depiction of clan cultures within organizations. That said, one might expect high levels of PSOC among organizational actors to be positively influenced by—and positively contribute to—more collectivistic and/or clan-oriented cultures. As such, PSOC has the potential to contribute to efforts to better explicate theories of emergence for how individual experience within an organization culminates to group-level phenomenon (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). Furthermore, while scholars have examined PSOC in aggregate as a property of a collective, PSOC does not necessarily require the assumption of a single “team” or collective task. Therefore, it may be more flexible in conceptualizing relations within underorganized or multiunit domains.
Organizational Identity
Among those organizational constructs focused at the individual level of analysis, a popular construct in the management literature which may share some similarity to PSOC is organizational identity. As Riketta (2005, p. 361) notes in a recent meta-analysis of the concept, all organizational identity definitions “imply that the organizational member has linked his or her organizational membership to his or her self-concept, either cognitively (e.g., feeling a part of the organization; internalizing organizational values), emotionally (pride in membership), or both.”
When looking at organizational identity in direct comparison with PSOC, both constructs reference an individual’s cognitive state. They both reference a sense of membership or connection with the organization that fulfills key needs for a positive identity, but organizational identity is more singularly concerned that the individual’s values are congruent with the values of the organization. Moreover, while organizational identity focuses on psychological connection to an organization, the specific referent of identification is often broadly defined in the construct development on organizational identity. Organizations have many facets that may invoke a sense of identification—for example, a staff member may identify with the status or prestige of the organization, the organization’s mission, its technological approach, or its leadership. PSOC is in some ways a more narrowly focused concept concerned specifically with the experience of feeling part of a social collective. Because the referent of identification is left ambiguous in much of construct development and measurement of organizational identity, the degree of correlation between the two constructs is similarly unknown at this time and is an interesting area for future research. However, conceptually, PSOC has potential to offer a value-added augmentation to our understanding of organizational identity by providing the theoretical and methodological frameworks for investigating the unique role that the experience of community has in shaping organizational identity.
Organizational Commitment
Organizational commitment was seminally defined by Mowday, Steers, and Porter (1979, p. 226) as the “the relative strength of an individual’s identification with and involvement in a particular organization.” As one can surmise by this definition, researchers treated organizational identity and organizational commitment as synonyms for several years (Riketta, 2005). In the late 1980s, researchers in a number of fields rediscovered organizational identity as a unique construct, and after Ashforth and Mael (1989) outlined the significance of social–psychological theories to organizational behavior research, studies on organizational identity as a separate construct to organizational commitment flourished. The construct of organizational commitment has been the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention and debate. Allen and Meyer (1990) distinguished three forms of organizational commitment: affective, continuance, and normative. This three-dimensional framework has emerged as the most prominent model for conceptualizing organizational commitment (Cohen, 2007). However, recent scholarship has challenged the conceptual and psychometric distinctiveness of the affective, continuance, and normative dimensions (e.g., Cohen, 2007; Klein et al., 2012). Cohen (2007) argued for reconceptualizing the dimensions of organizational commitment temporally as consisting of a preemployment propensity for commitment stemming from normative and instrumental expectations, and during employment, which transitions to the realization of commitment grounded in affective (identification or emotional involvement) and instrumental (quality of tangible exchanges) dimensions. Klein et al. (2012) propose a different approach, arguing that the study of commitment in organizations to date has been hindered by the misassumptions that all types of organizational bonds are commitment and that organizational commitment translates to all other targets (e.g., goal commitment and team commitment). In an effort to simplify the field, they urge for detaching the study of commitment from any particular target. They propose that construct clarity can be enhanced if commitment is defined based on the characteristics and strength of bond an individual has to a given target. Their conceptualization is intended to be equally relevant to all targets. Instead, what they argue is central in the definition of commitment is the volitional dedication to and responsibility for a target.
While this literature suggests that considerable construct ambiguity persists in understanding organizational commitment, several themes can be extracted. Specifically, organizational commitment is generally recognized as stemming from different cognitive rationales (affective, instrumental, normative), it represents a unique type of bond that emphasizes a stance of dedication and responsibility, and it is predisposed based on instrumental and normative expectations as well as organizational context. These themes offer clear parallels to the literature on PSOC. Both constructs share a common level of analysis, representing the psychological experience of a relationship by an individual. The literatures of both constructs have recognized that relationships can be rooted in affective, instrumental, and normative bases. For example, PSOC dimensions of membership and shared emotional connection tap into an affective rationale. The dimensions of needs fulfillment and influence focus primarily on an instrumental rationale while the dimension of responsibility is based most strongly in a normative rationale.
However, several key distinctions between PSOC and organizational commitment constructs are also apparent. First, a defining attribute of PSOC that is distinct from organizational commitment is the target. Whereas organizational commitment may be associated to a range of targets including a contract or goal (Klein et al., 2012), PSOC cannot. PSOC is not applicable outside of the context of a defined social collective. Second, PSOC and organizational commitment differ in their focal emphasis. For example, Klein, et al. (2012) assert that the concept of organizational commitment should be restricted to bonds that are defined by sentiments of dedication and responsibility. Dedication and responsibility are a dimension of the experience of community (Nowell & Boyd, 2010), but responsibility is not superordinate to feelings of membership, needs fulfillment, shared emotional connection, and influence. PSOC dimensions span the bond types of instrumental, commitment, and identification presented by Klein et al. (2012).
While ongoing conceptual debates associated with organizational commitment make comparisons difficult, PSOC and organizational commitment appear to be related constructs that are conceptually engineered to serve different purposes. Organizational commitment focuses its definitional boundaries on the nature of a bond (i.e., commitment), while being nonspecific on the nature of the target (e.g., Klein et al., 2012). PSOC seeks to be specific on the nature of a target (community) and the content of the bond (e.g., membership and influence) while being inclusive of a range of bond types (e.g., instrumental, commitment, and identification). As such PSOC is likely a more appropriate construct for investigating organizations as communities as it seeks to capture a more holistic and multidimensional picture of the experience of community.
Psychological Contract Fulfillment
Psychological contracts refer to the perceived obligations that exist between an employer and its employees (Atkinson, 2007) or the promises an organization is perceived to have made to its employees (Ho, 2005). The literature on psychological contracts has sought to characterize the nature of psychological contracts within organizational settings and investigate the outcomes of contract fulfillment and violation or breach on employee attitudes and behavior (Rousseau, 1995; Turnley, Bolino, Lester, & Bloodgood, 2003). The basic thrust of this literature argues that the employer–employee relationship is characterized by a number of transactional and relational obligations (Rousseau, 1990). For example, employers may be viewed as having a duty to reward exceptional performance, provide opportunity for upward mobility, and provide the support necessary for employees to carry out their roles within the organization. In return, employers may perceive employees have the responsibility to perform extra role behaviors to advance organizational goals and provide reasonable notice if they seek employment elsewhere. These perceptions are important because the perceived fulfillment or breach of psychological contracts has been shown to have a significant relationship with a number of important employee outcomes such as job satisfaction, intention to stay, and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) (for example see, Bal, De Lange, Jansen, & Van Der Velde, 2008; Robinson & Morrison, 1995; Sutton & Griffin, 2004; Turnley & Feldman, 1999; 2000).
The literature on psychological contracts shares some common themes with PSOC. Like PSOC, psychological contracts are a psychological phenomenon and focus on the individual level of analysis. Both constructs share an underlying theoretical logic that an individual’s behavior within a given social context such as a workplace is driven, in part, by their perceptions about the nature of the relationship between themselves and that context. However, again, there are also some key differences. Psychological contracts concern a very specific relationship within a social context—between an employee and their employer. PSOC, however, focuses on the perceived relationship of an individual to a social context such as a workplace. Furthermore, these two constructs seek to operationalize different aims. The literature on psychological contracts focuses on the notion of obligations within a social context and whether perceived obligations are fulfilled or breached as a driver of behavior. PSOC is focused on the phenomenological experience of a social context as a community. The nature of the relationship between psychological contract fulfillment and PSOC is empirically unclear at this time and an interesting area for future research. For example, it is reasonable to think that perceived fulfillment of psychological contracts might be positively related to PSOC in some contexts—particularly with regard to the dimension of needs fulfillment. However, this relationship would likely be dependent upon congruence between the perceived obligation and a perceived need or value on the part of the employee. In other words, just because an organization doesn’t break its promises doesn’t mean the kind of promises the organization makes will necessarily lead to a feeling of community.
Social Capital
A final popular construct in the management literature that may share some similarity with PSOC is organizational social capital. Oh, Labianca, and Chung (2006) describe social capital as a set of resources made available through group members’ social relationships. In their review of the literature on social capital in organizations, they identify four types of resources that can be obtained through social relationships. These include information, political opportunity and influence, emotional support, and mutual trust. However, like organizational commitment, social capital has been subject to a great deal of debate concerning its definition and conceptualization. Adler and Kwon (2002) characterize the diversity of definitions as varying along two dimensions. First, scholars have varied in whether they focus on the substance, sources, or effects of social capital. Second, definitions differ on whether they adopt an individual or collective level of analysis. At the individual level, the focus is on the relations an actor maintains with other actors. At the collective level, the focus is on how the characteristics of relations among a collection of actors facilitates goal accomplishment of the collective.
Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) proposed a three-dimensional framework of social capital that encompassed structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions. The structural dimension refers to the configuration of linkages between people or units as represented in Burt’s structural hole theory (1992), Granovetter’s strength of weak ties theory (1973), and Coleman’s closure theory (1988). The relational approach refers to the nature and attributes of the personal relationships among people such as characteristics of trust, goodwill, and friendship. Granovetter’s theory of embeddedness (1992) draws up this approach, positing that instrumental and economic exchanges take place and are therefore influenced by an existing web of social relations. The cognitive dimension is the least developed of the three. According to Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998), cognitive social capital consists of shared language and narratives that facilitate collective action.
In examining the relationship of organizational social capital and PSOC, there are some similarities. Both constructs emphasize benefits that can be gained via membership within a defined social structure. In fact, some scholars have argued for a broad conceptualization of social capital and suggest that PSOC be conceptualized as an aspect of social capital (e.g., Perkins & Long, 2002). However, the scholarly emphasis and measurement of these two constructs suggest some key points of divergence. First, the level of analysis for PSOC is inherently individual. Social capital varies in its application as an attribute to an individual versus an attribute of a collective. However, a collective such as an organization cannot have a high level of PSOC absent of the aggregated level of PSOC of its composite members. Conversely, organizations can be theorized to possess social capital that does not necessarily disaggregate to social capital for its individual members. Furthermore, predominant conceptualizations of social capital focuses specifically on resources, value, or advantage made possible through networks (Adler & Kwon, 2002; Coleman, 1988; Oh et al., 2006). In Granovetter’s theory of embeddedness, individuals are in social groups where, based on their social network ties to each other, they engage in economic exchanges and resource flows that eventuate in advantages or disadvantages for the actor.
Different from PSOC, social capital is not the perception of advantages made possible through membership, it is the advantage itself and the social structure that confers that advantage. Accordingly, social capital is not a psychological phenomenon but rather a sociological phenomenon defined by its function (Coleman, 1988). Consequently, the actual nature and patterns of individual ties among actors in the network is paramount to understanding social capital. These measures are not generally considerations in measures of PSOC. Indeed, it is theoretically possible for an individual to psychologically experience a PSOC with a community of individuals to whom they have relatively limited personal relationships while someone with a great number of personal ties could still feel limited PSOC. Even cognitive dimensions of social capital require some measure of consensus or similarity among members and a confirmation that these shared cognitions lead to some individual or collective outcome of value. Measures of PSOC require no such reciprocity in cognition.
That said, PSOC is rooted in the perception of membership and affiliation to a collective and the privileges and responsibilities that accompany that membership. Therefore, we would expect a positive and reciprocal relationship between these constructs. As one develops relationships within a group that provide information, political opportunity and emotional support, it is reasonable to expect that one’s PSOC within that collective might be subsequently enhanced.
PSOC Value Added? A Review of the Outcomes of PSOC and Their Relevance for Management
In the previous section, we compared PSOC with other related constructs prominent in the field to explore the distinctiveness of the construct. However, being unique from other management constructs is not sufficient for PSOC to be value-added to the field of management. For it to be worthy of continued investigation, there must be reason to believe that PSOC is a key influence on outcomes of concern to management scholars and practitioners. In this next section, we review the empirical literature on the outcomes of PSOC from parallel literatures with an eye toward examining the relevance of such outcomes for organizational/management contexts.
The theorized outcomes of PSOC are rooted in human needs, expectancy, and cognitive dissonance theories and revolve around two areas of inquiry: the relationship of PSOC to indicators of psychological well-being, and PSOC as a motivator of prosocial behavior. Each of these will be examined separately in terms of their theoretical basis and empirical support followed by a discussion of their relevance for organizational and managerial contexts.
PSOC and Psychological Well-Being
The relationship of PSOC to psychological well-being is predicated on the notion that PSOC is created by the interaction of an individual’s physiological and psychological needs with the community context in terms of its ability to meet those needs (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). In this sense, PSOC is created when a community context serves as a resource for meeting key physiological and psychological needs such as the need for affiliation, influence, and affection (McMillan, 2011; Nowell & Boyd, 2010). The fulfillment of these needs is theorized to result in greater psychological well-being.
Several studies have sought to examine this relationship. One of the earliest was conducted by Davidson and Cotter (1991). Using town or city as the primary referent, they examined the relationship of PSOC to resident well-being operationalized by measures of happiness, worrying, and personal coping. As predicted, they found significant positive relationships of PSOC with all indicators of well-being in three independent samples of residents. Similarly, Pretty et al. (1996) found that neighborhood PSOC was negatively related to adolescent loneliness and positively related to subjective evaluations of well-being. A more recent validation on the relationship of PSOC to loneliness among adolescents was conducted by Prezza and Pacilli (2007) who also found lower levels of reported loneliness among adolescents with higher PSOC.
This area of research has since been expanded to consider the role of PSOC as a mediator between the physical and social characteristics of a community context and individual outcomes. For example, Prezza and Costantini (1998) looked at the relationship of PSOC to indicators of wellness and life satisfaction across small, medium, and large urban areas. They found significant positive correlations between PSOC and life satisfaction, perceived social support, and self-esteem for individuals in a small town. However, these relationships attenuated under more densely urban settings suggesting PSOC may have a stronger relationship to well-being when the community of referent is more proximal. Farrel, Aubry, and Coulombe (2004) examined how the built and demographic characteristics of neighborhoods influence resident well-being. They found PSOC to be a direct predicator of well-being and a significant mediator of the relationship between neighborhood stability and well-being. Finally, Peterson et al. (2008) found positive associations between PSOC and psychological empowerment and mental health. They found a negative association of PSOC to depression.
Collectively, this body of research provides support for the proposition that individuals who are embedded in a community context to which they feel a strong PSOC are more likely to be psychologically healthier. Recent research on the role of PSOC as a protective psychological factor helps to clarify the directionality of this relationship. Greenfield and Marks (2010) found that PSOC mitigated the influence of psychological distress from physical and psychological violence experienced during childhood. Clearly, there is some empirical support and a significant theoretical basis that studying community contexts and their influence on PSOC can potentially lead to enhanced insights on how to increase psychological well-being.
The psychological health of employees is of parallel concern to management scholars. Based on the logic presented so far, a PSOC is derived by the interaction of an individual’s physiological and psychological needs with the community context in terms of its ability to meet those needs. Instead of a community context, an organizational member is embedded in system contexts that range from interorganizational networks to small work units within an organization.
In line with this thinking, PSOC would be created when organizational contexts provide resources that influence employee perceptions that their physiological and psychological needs are fulfilled. Translating this to management settings, as organization member perceptions of needs fulfillment increase, PSOC would develop, and—based on findings from other literatures—we would hypothesize this to result in greater employee job satisfaction (one of the most common measures of employee well-being in the organizational literature). In fact, Brooke, Russell, and Price (1988) claimed that job satisfaction reflects an individual’s general attitude toward the job, stemming from the gratification of needs and wants. Further support for this notion was provided by Judge and his colleagues (Judge & Bono, 2001; Judge, Locke, Durham, & Kluger, 1998). They found that psychological perceptions of work were one of the primary causes of job satisfaction. Similarly, other scholars (Fried & Ferris, 1987; Parisi & Weiner, 1999; Weiner, 2000) demonstrated that job satisfaction is best predicted by employee perceptions that working conditions are challenging and interesting. In organizational settings, PSOC would develop in organizational contexts that perceptually fulfill needs and wants of employees. In turn, development of a PSOC would likely affect employee well-being. One study, by Burroughs and Eby (1998), appears to tentatively support these contentions. They showed that PSOC at work was strongly related to job satisfaction. Moreover, given that job satisfaction has consistently been shown to predict employee turnover (Griffeth, Hom, & Gaertner, 2000; Kinicki, McKee-Ryan, Schriesheim, & Carson, 2002; Price, 1977, 2001) and to be somewhat related to employee performance (Bowling, 2007; Judge & Bono, 2001), explorations that PSOC relates to employee well-being might be fruitful for understanding additional organizational outcomes.
PSOC and Community Engagement
The second branch of scholarship on the outcomes of PSOC views PSOC as fundamentally a theory of human motivation. It assumes that humans are motivated to act in ways they believe will enhance the likelihood of their needs being satisfied. It would predict that community-oriented behavior is a rational action taken based on the expectation that such behaviors will create a community context that is more likely to meet one’s needs. Within this logic, when the community meets one’s needs, members will likely engage in a variety of important social outcomes such as becoming more civically involved, participating in community-enhancing efforts, and maintaining longer-term residence in the community. Based on the work of Nowell and Boyd (2010), an alternative and complementary motivational logic underlying PSOC is a values-based perspective that focuses on the role of normative sentiments for motivating behavior. Their work emphasizes the extent to which affiliation with a given community evokes a sense of personal responsibility for the community well-being that serves as a psychological motivator for procommunity behaviors. Whether borne out of a desire to enhance the value of one’s community as a personal resource, a sense of responsibility for the well-being of the community, or some combination therein, there is significant empirical support for the proposition that individuals who report higher levels of PSOC are also more likely to engage in procommunity-type behaviors. One of the earliest and most rigorous tests of this relationship to date was a longitudinal analysis by Chavis and Wandersman (1990) who examined the relationship of PSOC and resident participation in block associations over a 1-year period. Consistent with the theory of PSOC, they found PSOC and participation to be reciprocally interdependent. PSOC at Time 1 was significantly related to increases in participation while at the same time, participation at Time 1 was significantly related to increases in PSOC. Since that study, PSOC has been found to be positively associated with a variety of indicators of community engagement including involvement in neighborhood organizations (Brodsky et al., 1999, Hughey et al., 1999; Prezza et al., 2009), political participation (Brodsky et al., 1999, Hughey et al., 1999), and civic involvement (Albanesi et al., 2007; Peterson et al., 2008.).
PSOC as a theory of human motivation has widespread applicability to many of the prominent concerns of management scholars interested in fostering a workforce that is engaged, mindful, and civically oriented to the needs of the organization and their fellow coworkers. Employees enter organizational contexts with normative predispositions toward social responsibility (Cohen, 2007). Then, organizational culture and management systems, as well as employee experiences within the setting, can interact with these employee values in a way that alters an individual’s feeling of responsibility to the organization and motivations to get more involved. Within this logic, when the organization meets individual needs and evokes a sense of responsibility, employees will likely engage in a variety of important proorganizational behaviors such as OCB. This appears to be supported in the organizational literature. First, Smith, Organ, and Near (1983) confirmed that OCB is an exhibition of prosocial disposition propensity, and Finkelstein (2006) indicated that employees’ prosocial value can influence their OCB. Grant and Mayer (2009) also found that individual’s prosocial motivation can predict citizenship behavior (such as voice). In addition, as for the antecedents of OCB, scholars have achieved a general consensus that OCB is the outcome of the interaction between individuals and organizational contextual variables. Lavelle, Rupp, and Brockner (2007) pointed out that when employees perceive organizational justice and high quality leader–member exchange relationships, they will actively exhibit OCB on the basis of a positive reciprocity norm. Social exchange theory and the norm of reciprocity are the foundation theories of OCB. The basic assumption is that when employees perceive organization justice as a contextual feature, they will exhibit OCB to pay back proceeding from the norm of reciprocity (Lavelle et al., 2007).
In this situation, PSOC would develop in organizational contexts that enhance social responsibility perceptions, and in turn would affect outcomes of OCB. Tentative support for this contention appears to be provided by Burroughs and Eby (1998) who showed that PSOC was strongly related to OCB behaviors of loyalty, civic virtue, altruism, and courtesy, and by Peterson et al. (2006) who showed that PSOC is correlated to psychological empowerment, participation, and organizational involvement. Finally, considering that OCB has been shown to consistently correlate with employee performance and retention, and other important organizational outcomes (Podsakoff,Whiting, Podsakoff, & Blume, 2009), PSOC holds promise as a factor that may influence OCB as well as other organizational outcomes.
Does PSOC Have Utility for Different Management Areas of Inquiry? Some Tentative Possibilities
The question of whether PSOC has utility in a wide variety of management domains is, at this point, unanswerable. However, we believe the concept could potentially apply to more management areas of inquiry than those that have been articulated so far. To provide examples of the utility of PSOC across the field of management, we offer a brief and tentative discussion in the following areas of inquiry: change management, organizational networks, business policy and strategy, organizational behavior, and gender and diversity studies. We chose these fields because of their diversity to each other as well as to demonstrate how PSOC might be utilized in major and minor fields of management.
One context for exploring the applicability of PSOC is in the field of organization development and change. Several authors have suggested that PSOC might be an important ingredient for organizational members during the stages of a change event, and that PSOC might be important for change agent teams, top executive leadership, self-directed work groups, and other stakeholders during change initiatives (Barczak et al., 1987; Boyd & Angelique, 2002; Boyd & Bright, 2007). For example, change agent teams typically work in close proximity to each other, and tend to continuously debate and challenge ideas as they are generated. Given its posited relationship to collaborative learning (e.g., Kreijns, Kirschner, & Jochems, 2003), there is reason to suspect PSOC may positively influence a group’s ability to generate alternative ideas and solutions to problems. However, it is possible that a PSOC could hinder this process if PSOC stimulated a process of “groupthink” (Janis, 1972). For practicing managers, it might be important to assess the nature of PSOC by administering a scale like the BSCS to appropriate stakeholders during a change event, and then determine whether PSOC is influencing processes and outcomes of the change event.
Outside the firm, PSOC has potential implications for networked settings. While this area has been largely unexplored, scholars have argued for the importance of a collective sense of membership and efficacy as key aspects of collaborative capacity (e.g., Foster-Fishman, Berkowitz, Lounsbury, Jacobson, & Allen, 2001). In a discussion on the management and configuration of value networks, Allee (2000) proposes PSOC as a key intangible benefit of strategic alliances. Furthermore, Jansen, Finkelstein, and Brinkkemper (2009) propose PSOC as an organizing framework for conceptualizing ecosystems of software development and vender networks. Some related research lends support to this idea. For example, Rovai (2002) found that PSOC was positively related to satisfaction and learning in asynchronous learning networks. In this setting, practicing managers might assess the existence and level of PSOC in a collaborative, network, or alliance, and determine whether it influences outcomes like commitment, satisfaction, efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness.
In the business policy and strategy domain, managers conduct strategic planning, design mission, vision, and value statements, construct organizational policies, and set the future course of the firm. PSOC might be an important organizational goal for top management that either mediates or coexists among other traditional organizational outcomes like turnover, absenteeism, productivity, and profit. For example, if PSOC is found to be negatively correlated with absenteeism, managers might consider measuring PSOC and implementing community-building interventions to foster reductions in absenteeism. In addition, considering that absenteeism has been found to negatively relate to job satisfaction (see Scott & Taylor, 1985), developing a PSOC might increase satisfaction with work. On a macro level, a PSOC might be related to overall organizational functioning. Strategy scholars and practitioners have been recently promoting the measurement of triple-bottom-line indices that show the organization’s commitment to achieving profit, environmental, and social outcomes (see Savitz, 2006). PSOC might be an important social outcome that organizations strive to achieve, yet to date, is not included in typical social outcome reporting. To do this, managers might need to focus on the antecedents of PSOC that we presented earlier. For example, we noted that PSOC likely occurs when physiological and psychological needs are met, and if so, managers might want to assess the level of need fulfillment for current employees via any number of instruments including surveys, focus groups, and interviews. To create items for assessment, managers could use a needs-based framework for their inquiry (e.g., Maslow’s Need Hierarchy and Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory). In addition, we noted that a sense of responsibility, as part of PSOC, might be a function of normative prosocial perceptions within individuals. Here, managers might assess civic responsibility, or service motivation perceptions, during a personnel selection process to hire talent that will import a sense of responsibility to the organization.
In the field of organizational behavior, managers focus on individual and group characteristics of work. Here, PSOC might be a construct that predicts or influences concepts like leadership, team functioning, and employee motivation. For example, a characteristic of a good leader might be that they possess the capability of developing a PSOC within their top management team, within their organizations, and with other organizations in collaborative relationships. Developing PSOC might be a function of certain “soft skills” of management that need to be learned through training and development. In addition, a PSOC might be an important characteristic of high-performing teams that independently affect things like group structure, team cohesion, functioning, and effectiveness. For example, there might be certain group structures that increase the likelihood of achieving a PSOC, or it might act as an independent variable that promotes better functioning in small groups. Finally, an individual PSOC, or a feeling of community across the organization, might be a factor that relates to increased employee motivation. For example, employees who perceive that their organization promotes a sense of community might respond with greater productivity at work. In this context, managers could measure PSOC, and determine whether it correlates or leads to a variety of individual and group characteristics.
In the area of gender and diversity studies in management, PSOC might be a concept that is fostered within homogeneous ethnicity contexts or it might be found that it occurs when women dominate the upper management ranks. For example, employees might express a greater PSOC when their immediate boss is female, which is caused by specific managerial skills that women may possess in greater numbers than men. Or, employees might achieve a PSOC by being situated in spatial contexts with other employees that are ethnically “more like them.” If so, this would pose an interesting challenge for organizational designers who are faced with increasing diversity in workspaces. To achieve greater levels of sense of community, office designers might search for a compromise between spacing “in group” and “out group” individuals in close proximity to each other. Finally, it is possible that PSOC might be a characteristic of integrated diverse workplaces. For example, to achieve a diverse workplace, managers might need to first foster a PSOC via specific community-building interventions that, in turn, allow diverse stakeholders to effectively live with each other in organizations.
At this point, as noted, we do not have definitive answers to the number of management domains where sense of community could apply, however, it seems probable that PSOC could be an important concept in a number of management inquiry areas.
Conclusion and Implications for Future Research
At their core, organizations are collectives, comprising individuals who participate in coordinated action. Individuals seek membership into these collectives for a variety of reasons including the desire to obtain resources, gain influence, attain a sense of belonging and affiliation, find and develop positive relationships with others, to have an impact on something of importance, and/or to conform to standards of what is expected and acceptable. As such, the metaphor of community applies to organizations as much as it does to neighborhoods or towns.
In this article, we introduced the construct of PSOC, drawn from the behavioral and social sciences, and we argued that it can be translated to offer a relevant and unique contribution to the field of management. In the behavioral and social sciences, PSOC has been a fruitful construct for explaining important outcomes such as citizen participation, residence, psychological health and well-being, and voluntary engagement in community betterment efforts in neighborhoods and schools. The organizational counterparts of these outcomes such as OCB, staff retention, and employee wellness are of no less concern to management scholars. Therefore, there is great potential for the construct of PSOC to make an equally valuable contribution to management science. However, for this potential to be realized, gaps in the theoretical and methodological development of the construct in the milieu of organizational settings will need to be addressed. We believe that this article is an important first step in that process by exposing the existence of the concept, and providing an argument that PSOC is a relevant and unique concept in field of management. In addition, we believe that PSOC might be important in a variety of theoretical and functional management domains, and perhaps the present work will help to stimulate further research activity to determine the viability of this concept in multiple areas of management inquiry.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.