Organizational cultural strength as the negative cross-entropy of mindshare: a measure based on descriptive text

Marchetti, A and Puranam, P (2022) Organizational cultural strength as the negative cross-entropy of mindshare: a measure based on descriptive text. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. ISSN 2662-9992 (In Press) OPEN ACCESS

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.

More Details

Item Type: Article
Subject Areas: Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Additional Information:

© The Author(s) 2022

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Date Deposited: 17 May 2022 15:34
Date of first compliant deposit: 17 May 2022
Subjects: Organisational development
Last Modified: 21 Nov 2024 02:38
URI: https://lbsresearch.london.edu/id/eprint/2533
More

Export and Share


Download

Published Version - Text
  • Available under License

Statistics

Altmetrics
View details on Dimensions' website

Downloads from LBS Research Online

View details

Actions (login required)

Edit Item Edit Item