What is the Culture 500?
The Culture 500 is an interactive index created at MIT that measures and
compares the cultures of over 500 of the largest companies in the United
States. The Culture 500 data set includes more than 1.4 million ... Read More... Read More How do you define company culture?
For the Culture 500, we regard company culture in terms of the definition of
organizational culture put forth by scholars Charles O’Reilly and Jennifer
Chatman: “a set of norms and values that are widely shared and ... Read More... Read More Why do you define corporate culture in terms of values?
The academic literature includes over 50 distinct definitions of corporate
culture, but we focus on corporate values for two reasons. First, companies
universally describe their cultures in terms of values. In a study ... Read More... Read More What cultural values does the Culture 500 measure?
The Culture 500 focuses on nine key cultural values that we call the Big 9:
agility, collaboration, customer orientation, diversity, execution, innovation,
integrity, performance, and respect. These values were selected ... Read More... Read More Is corporate culture the same thing as a company’s official values?
Absolutely not. We studied over 500 large, mainly U.S. companies and found
that 82% published official corporate values on their websites. We then
compared those companies’ official values with how well they liv... Read More... Read More Why does culture matter?
A distinctive corporate culture can boost employee engagement, create
competitive advantage, predict financial outcomes, and promote ethical
behavior and social change.Having a strong culture that support... Read More... Read More What makes a culture good or bad?
It does not make sense to reduce corporate culture to a simple “good” or
“bad” characterization. This is why the Culture 500 emphasizes performance
across the Big 9 values and does not use top-level rankings of cu... Read More... Read More How does the Culture 500 work?
The Culture 500 analyzes 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews using natural
language processing technology developed by CultureX. It accurately
assesses which cultural values employees discuss in their review... Read More... Read More Why do you use Glassdoor reviews for the data set?
After considering a number of different approaches, we determined that
Glassdoor was the ideal data source for a large-scale study of corporate
culture. In order to benchmark corporate cultures using machine... Read More... Read More Are Glassdoor reviews dominated by disgruntled employees?
No. Contrary to what some think, Glassdoor is not dominated by disgruntled
employees with an ax to grind. Only 10% of reviewers in the Culture 500
leave one-star reviews, and the majority of reviews (53%) are po... Read More... Read More Can employers manipulate Glassdoor reviews?
No. The company uses proprietary algorithms to identify suspicious reviews
and relies on human moderators to inspect suspect content. Employees can
also anonymously notify Glassdoor if their company attempts to ... Read More... Read More How were the Culture Champions selected?
Culture Champion companies perform significantly better than their industry
peers across multiple Big 9 cultural values. This designation as a cultural
champion is intended to recognize strong cultures that excel in ... Read More... Read More What does it mean to say a company “walks the talk” on culture?
The Culture 500 research team recently analyzed over 500 large companies
and found virtually zero correlation between their stated cultural values and
actual cultural performance, although some employers buck this... Read More... Read More How can I use the Culture 500 as a manager?
HR professionals, managers, and executive leaders can use the Culture 500
index to audit their companies and their competitors across nine cultural
dimensions, allowing them to measure culture just like other imp... Read More... Read More Why isn’t a company I’m interested in included in the Culture 500?
To be included in the Culture 500, a company must meet the following
criteria: Have a large number of U.S. reviews on Glassdoor (the average
company in our sample has more than 2,000 reviews). A greater ... Read More... Read More Why do some companies have multiple entries or go by different names in the Culture 500?
For employer branding and other reasons, some employers on Glassdoor opt
to have different employer profiles for different parts of their organization.
The Culture 500 captures these different employer branding con... Read More... Read More Why does the Culture 500 contain mostly U.S. companies?
At present, our analysis is based solely on U.S. reviews, which means that for
the most part, the constituent companies are headquartered in the U.S. We
have included some international companies with a large numbe... Read More... Read More How has COVID-19 impacted how employees rate company culture?
The coronavirus pandemic has had a massive impact on organizations and
millions of employees in the U.S. and across the globe. To better understand
how COVID-19 has shaped employee sentiment of corporate cult... Read More... Read More