Much of the research on organizational culture has been driven by the assumption that culture is associated with organizational performance. Surprisingly, the evidence for this linkage is ambiguous for two understandable reasons. First, there has been a proliferation of definitions and measures of the construct itself which has made aggregation of findings across studies confusing. Second, demonstrating that culture affects objective firm performance requires large cross-organizational samples—but the modal approach to measuring culture using surveys or qualitative research has made this difficult. Using a natural language processing measure of culture with a sample of 309 large U.S. companies, we show how (1) the norms and values that define culture may be understood as representing three underlying cultural archetypes (performance-orientation, people, and customers) and (2) that these archetypes are related to objective firm performance in understandable ways. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research on organizational culture.
