Toward the understanding of the constituents of organizational culture: The embedded topic modeling analysis of publicly available employee‐generated reviews of two major U.S.‐based retailers

Abstract

Organizational culture is considered an important factor affecting several operations‐oriented functions in an organization. However, the research surrounding organizational culture and what constitutes organizational culture remains understudied in the operations management (OM) discipline. This study utilizes 24,965 employee‐generated (EG) text reviews of two major U.S.‐based retailers and applies an advanced embedded topic modeling technique to identify prevalent cultural elements that retail operational workers in these organizations deemed most important. Overall, the analysis yielded 19 distinct cultural elements across the two retailers with unique elements belonging to each organization. The study provides a novel way to study organizational culture in the OM discipline and describes the workings of different text analytics methods in detail. In addition to making a methodological contribution to the field, this study provides actionable insights to practitioners and lists several avenues of future research for OM scholars interested in utilizing text analytics to study organizational culture and other operations‐oriented research problems using text data.