Introducing Thriving at Work to the Field of Community Psychology

Advances in the organizational behavior and management literatures toward social sustainability are leading to new theories, models, and concepts that promote employee well-being and functioning while helping organizations achieved desired ends. One concept that has yet to be imported to community psychology is thriving at work, which is the joint experience of learning and vitality, where a worker is able to grow, develop, and feel energized (Spreitzer et al., 2005). This paper will articulate a definition of thriving at work, explore current theory and modeling of the concept, and show why it is a unique concept of importance to community psychologists. Then, thriving at work will be integrated into recent scholarship on sense of community and sense of community responsibility in organizational settings (Boyd & Nowell, 2014; Nowell & Boyd, 2010; 2011), with an eye on showing how thriving at work can help community psychologists advance organizational behavior research in our field. Finally, in the epilogue of the paper, some thoughts will be advanced on how thriving at work can be incorporated with important research topics in the field of community psychology, and how it can potentially be translated to community contexts in general. (C) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.