Three essays on organizational culture

Abstract

Organizational culture has been studied in organization and management literature for many years. Managers have recognized its importance for the corporation and its potential role as a driver of organizational performance. However, despite both academic and practitioner interest, we still lack a clear understanding of its impact on organizations. This dissertation leverages different research streams to advance our understanding of the relationship between culture and corporate responsible performance and the role that leadership plays in culture perception. For this purpose, I have conducted three empirical studies, leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to measure organizational culture unobtrusively, using Glassdoor's employee reviews. These studies are presented in the three chapters. The first chapter examines the effects of organizational culture as an antecedent of corporate misconduct and how organizational structure can exacerbate (or mitigate) its effects. I find that results-oriented cultures can lead to negative consequences when employees face performance pressure issues. Further, this effect worsens in decentralized companies, while more formalized organizational structures hinder this. The second chapter looks at two aspects of organizational culture: organizational purpose and ideology. Recent literature theorized an association of organizational purpose to sustainability as purpose-driven firms are more likely to act responsibly, beyond the constraints of profit maximization. I argue that this relationship would not hold in any organization, but only when it is consistent with the beliefs on the specific issue in the organization and its local community. To do so, I propose a deeper analysis of how purpose and ideology at the organizational and community level can explain reductions in corporate CO2 emissions. The results show that purpose, mediated by ideology, leads to significant emissions reductions. However, this effect disappears whether the company locates its headquarters in communities with polarized beliefs on climate change issues. The final explores how the public recognition of the CEO can affect how employees perceive their company's culture. Using CEO awards as an exogenous source of CEO prestige, I study the reaction in culture discourse after these events finding shortterm positive reactions related to the awards.