Identifying and quantifying Cultural Factors that Matter to the IT workforce: an Approach based on Automated Content Analysis

Organizational culture represents a key success factor in highly competitive environments, such as, the IT sector. Thus, IT companies need to understand what makes up a culture that fosters employee performance. While existing research typically uses self-report questionnaires to study the relation of culture and the success of companies, the validity of this approach is often discussed and researchers call for new ways of studying culture. Therefore, our research goal is to present an alternative approach to culture analysis for examining which cultural factors matter to the IT workforce. Our study builds on 112,610 online reviews of Fortune 500 IT companies collected from Glassdoor, an online platform on which current and former employees can anonymously review companies and their management. We perform an automated content analysis to identify cultural factors that employees emphasize in their reviews. Through a regression analysis on numerical employee satisfaction ratings, we find that a culture of learning and performance orientation contributes to employee motivation, while a culture of assertiveness and gender inegalitarianism has a strong negative influence on employees’ satisfaction in the IT workforce. Future research can apply our approach as an alternative method to quantifying culture and its impact on other variables.