Configurations of resourceful and demanding attributes of organizational culture in US hotels: An innovative approach using topic modeling and fsQCA

Abstract

This study distinguishes itself from existing organizational culture studies by investigating the relatively under-studied theoretical relationship between organizational culture and employer attractiveness. To capture the holistic nature of organizational culture theory, this study adopts configurational analysis, which contrasts resourceful cultural attributes (collaborative, employee development, and fair-compensation cultures) with demanding attributes (result-oriented, overworked, and job-insecurity cultures). This study proposes three configurational propositions of employer attractiveness and employs review-based topic modeling and fuzzy-set quality comparative analysis (fsQCA) to overcome the limitations of traditional survey-based measurement and regression analysis. For the empirical analysis, this study constructs an industry-wide dataset comprising 2209 quarterly samples from 157 hotels over six years, utilizing 54,889 employee reviews posted on Glassdoor in the United States. Topic modeling analysis adopting Latent Dirichlet Allocation extracts the probabilities of six cultural attributes. Finally, the fsQCA generates three groups of 13 configurations, leading to employer attractiveness: a fully resourced culture, a resourced and low-demanding culture, and a fairly compensated overwork culture. The findings confirm the core concepts of configurational analysis in contrast to regression analysis and present novel theoretical, methodological, and practical implications.