Managers' career preferences and corporate culture

Abstract

Building effective corporate culture is challenging as it requires senior managers to embed shared values within the firm. Yet some firms can do so, and some cannot. This study examines whether managers' career preferences influence manager-employee value misalignment and weaken corporate culture. Career preferences for job-hopping provide incentives for managers to signal their leadership quality in the labor market. We capture managers' and employees' attention allocation across different cultural values using data from conference calls and Glassdoor. We predict and find that job-hopping managers direct their attention away from soft cultural values (e.g., respect and integrity) that are less observable by the external labor market. Furthermore, job-hopping managers who pay insufficient attention to soft cultural values fail to address the concerns that employees have in their everyday work, resulting in lower overall employee culture ratings. Our study highlights the significance of managers' career preferences in shaping different cultural values and offers implications for firms selecting senior managers.