Stakeholder theory creates a core conflict between managers in publicly held corporations and their boards of directors. Benefit corporation legislation recently adopted in 31 states attempts to address this conflict between shareholder primacy doctrine and stakeholder theory. While benefit corporation statutes offer improvement over traditional corporate structure for firms operating according to instrumental stakeholder theory, they do not fully support the ends of normative stakeholder theory or alternative normative other-constituency approaches, such as recently introduced common good models of the firm. Managers choosing to employ normative other-constituency approaches may choose to put benefit corporation regulations to use in the states where these tools are available, but they will continue to be faced with conflicts between benefit corporation structure/governance and applying normative other-constituency approaches on a day-to-day basis in their operations.

Wedeven Associates is a small tribology research and engineering consulting firm located near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The company faced a variety of challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic as did most small businesses in 2020. As the company became fully operational again, Wedeven Associates was approached by a longtime client to solve a tribological problem the client’s engineers had been trying to address for many years. The catch: Wedeven Associates only had a little over 2 months to do the work while complying with pandemic-related travel and meeting restrictions. This case tells the story of how the Wedeven Associates team met the challenge using virtual tools and a collaborative approach built on first principles. Readers are introduced to “tribology” as an engineering discipline and “first principles” as a problem-solving approach.

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Recent research suggests experiencing community at work (i.e., perceiving a sense of community [SOC] and a sense of community responsibility [SOC‐R]) is important for employee and organizational outcomes, however, we know very little about how these constructs operate in human resource management contexts. This study peers into the strategic human resource management “black box,” which is an organizational setting where psychological and social variables are believed to influence employee perceptions in ways that impact their individual functioning, and subsequently improve organizational outcomes. Specifically, the study tests hypotheses regarding the relationship between high‐involvement work climate (i.e., a human resource context), psychological need satisfaction, SOC, SOC‐R, organizational identification, and organizational citizenship behaviors, in an attempt to theoretically ground, and empirically test, if experiences of community matter in the human resource management “black box.” Data from 312 employees across multiple organizations were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling, and the findings reveal that experiences of community likely play an important role in the strategic human resource black box. The findings highlight that human resource practitioners, and scholars at the intersection of community psychology and human resource management, should consider further evaluation and action around experiences of community at work. Such a focus may help to create and build more socially sustainable organizational contexts for employees where they can thrive while organizations attempt to achieve collective goals.

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