Community Inside and Out: Moving Community Front and Center in Management Research

As societal loneliness has reached epidemic proportions, the concept of community is receiving more attention as a possible antidote. However, to date, no systematic reviews have been conducted in organizational studies, and consensus is lacking on what defines community and how to create it. In our review of 839 articles, we found that the concept of community has been evoked to refer to various phenomena at the micro or macro level—in terms of neighborhood, profession or occupation, community of practice, or in a psychological sense. Scholars have examined community within the organization or outside the organization, but rarely within one study. We offer an integrative definition of community as a group of people who are defined by particular boundaries—geographic, physical, or relational—have a sense of membership that is within and distinct from others, share a connection or attachment, and have a sense of caring for or obligation to one another. We also identify in the literature common means of cultivating communities and outcomes of doing so, finding far more research addressing community benefits. We suggest ways of advancing our understanding of community by bringing together distinct perspectives on community inside the organization with community outside the organization.