Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2022

Abstract

The strength of an organization’s culture is an important property that may have implications for organizational structure, performance, diversity, and inclusion, independent of its content. However, progress on conceptualizing and measuring cultural strength has been restricted so far. We propose a novel measure of an organization’s cultural strength as the negative average cross-entropy of its members’ mindshare distributions, defined on a support comprising a set of firm-specific cultural elements. Using descriptive text data produced by 2.9 million individuals in about 95 thousand US firms from the employee review website Glassdoor.com, we calculate our measure of organizational cultural strength using topic modeling and show that it behaves as theoretically expected: older, smaller, and more geographically concentrated firms have stronger organizational cultures. We also note some intriguing associations between organizational cultural strength, role differentiation, and gender imbalance within firms. Finally, we discuss opportunities for using this new measure to understand how organizations work more generally.

Discipline

Business and Corporate Communications | Organizational Behavior and Theory | Strategic Management Policy

Research Areas

Corporate Communication; Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources

Publication

Humanities and Social Science Communications

Volume

9

Issue

1

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01152-1

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