Sentiment analysis in organizational work: Towards an ontology of people analytics

Abstract

Abstract The present paper proposes a conceptual ontology to evaluate human factors by modelling their key performance indicators and defining these indicators' explanatory factors, manifestations, and diverse corresponding digital footprints. Our methodology incorporates 6 main human resource constructs: performance, engagement, leadership, workplace dynamics, organizational developmental support, and learning and knowledge creation. Using sentiment analysis, we introduce a potential way to evaluate several components of the proposed human factors ontology. We use the Enron email corpus as a test case, to demonstrate how digital footprints can predict such phenomena. In so doing, we hope to encourage further research applying data mining techniques to allow real‐time, less costly, and more reliable assessments of human factor patterns and trends.