Idea in Brief
The Problem
Culture is easy to sense but difficult to measure. The workhorses of culture research—employee surveys and questionnaires—are often unreliable.
A New Approach
Studying the language that employees use in electronic communication has opened a new window into organizational culture. Research analyzing email, Slack messages, and Glassdoor postings is challenging prevailing wisdom about culture.
The Findings
- Cultural fit is important, but what predicts success most is the rate at which employees adapt as organizational culture changes over time.
- Cognitive diversity helps teams during ideation but hinders execution.
- The best cultures encourage diversity to drive innovation but are anchored by shared core beliefs.
A business’s culture can catalyze or undermine success. Yet the tools available for measuring it—namely, employee surveys and questionnaires—have significant shortcomings. Employee self-reports are often unreliable. The values and beliefs that people say are important to them, for example, are often not reflected in how they actually behave. Moreover, surveys provide static, or at best episodic, snapshots of organizations that are constantly evolving. And they’re limited by researchers’ tendency to assume that distinctive and idiosyncratic cultures can be neatly categorized into a few common types.