research on corporate culture

Corporate Culture: A Review and Directions for Future Research

31 Pages Posted: 3 May 2022

Jillian Grennan

University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, Institue for Business and Social Impact

University of British Columbia (UBC) - Sauder School of Business; Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER); China Academy of Financial Research (CAFR); European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI); Canadian Sustainable Finance Network (CSFN)

Date Written: April 28, 2022

We define corporate culture as an informal institution typified by patterns of behavior and reinforced by people, systems, and events. Corporate culture is manifest in many elements, but brings unity to employees’ perspectives through the expectations they have for how they need to behave to fit in and succeed in their firm. Advanced measurement techniques that make use of computational linguistics and granular data on companies are allowing researchers to study the dynamics of corporate culture at a level and scale previously impossible. These developments coupled with advances in the conceptualization and theory of corporate culture portend a rich research agenda moving forward. Corporate culture features elements of purposeful design and changes faster than societal culture; as such, one of the first steps in this research agenda is isolating the effects of people, systems, and events that serve as catalysts for cultural change. A richer understanding of the drivers of cultural change both in the short and long run can then serve as a foundation for testing and refuting cultural explanations for business outcomes and economic phenomena. This chapter summarizes this important research agenda and its achievements thus far, and outlines directions for future research.

Keywords: Corporate culture, informal institution, social norms, organizational economics, computational linguistics, intangible assets

JEL Classification: G30, G40, C10

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, Institue for Business and Social Impact ( email )

Berkeley, CA 94720 United States

Kai Li (Contact Author)

University of british columbia (ubc) - sauder school of business ( email ).

2053 Main Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 Canada 604-822-8353 (Phone) 604-822-4695 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://https://sites.google.com/view/kaili/home

Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER) ( email )

BIZ 2 Storey 4, 04-05 1 Business Link Singapore, 117592 Singapore

China Academy of Financial Research (CAFR) ( email )

1954 Huashan Road Shanghai P.R.China, 200030 China

European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) ( email )

c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium Rue Ducale 1 Hertogsstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium

Canadian Sustainable Finance Network (CSFN) ( email )

Queens University Kingston, ON Canada

HOME PAGE: http://https://smith.queensu.ca/centres/isf/research/network.php

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics, related ejournals, behavioral & experimental finance (editor's choice) ejournal.

Subscribe to this free journal for more curated articles on this topic

Accounting, Corporate Governance, Law & Institutions eJournal

Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic

Research Methods & Methodology in Accounting eJournal

Corporate governance & sociology or psychology ejournal, corporate governance: economic consequences, history, development, & methodology ejournal, organizations & markets: policies & processes ejournal, sustainability at work ejournal, industrial & organizational psychology ejournal, comparative political economy: comparative capitalism ejournal.

• Employee Success Platform Improve engagement, inspire performance, and build a magnetic culture.
• Engagement Survey
• Lifecycle Surveys
• Pulse Surveys
• Action Planning
• Talent Reviews
• Performance Reviews
• Succession Planning
• Recognition
• Expert-Informed AI
• Seamless Integrations
• Award-Winning Service
• Robust Analytics
• Scale Employee Success with AI
• Drive Employee Retention
• Identify and Develop Top Talent
• Build High Performing Teams
• Increase Strategic Alignment
• Manage Remote Teams
• Improve Employee Engagement
• Customer Success Stories
• Customer Experience
• Customer Advisory Board
• Not Another Employee Engagement Trends Report
• Everyone Owns Employee Success
• Employee Success ROI Calculator
• Employee Retention Quiz
• Ebooks & Templates
• Leadership Team
• Partnerships
• Best Places to Work
• Request a Demo

The Importance of Organizational Culture

Research & advice for building a more magnetic culture.

65% of employees say their company culture has changed post-pandemic. Our research shows that employee perceptions of company culture have a direct impact on engagement and retention. This information can help leaders rethink their approach to culture and create a foundation for business success.

2022 Organizational Culture Research Report

Table of contents.

What is organizational culture

The top elements of organizational culture

What employees think about organizational culture

How culture impacts employee engagement & retention risk

Where organizational culture thrives

What employees want in an organizational culture

Who shapes organizational culture

5 tips for creating a strong, engaging culture

Make culture easier with quantum workplace.

Unpacking organizational culture 

Company culture has become a top priority for leaders across all industries. In fact, 66% of executives believe culture is more important than an organization's business strategy or operation model. 

The rise of remote and hybrid work has had a significant impact on the way we work. Our research shows 65% of employees say their company culture has changed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the workplace has changed, culture has too—for better or for worse.

Those organizations that have adapted their approach to culture have fared well over the past few years. They've created an attractive value proposition for prospective talent and have kept current employees engaged—even through periods of significant change. Those who have been slower to evolve have seen consequences of disengagement, burnout, and unwanted turnover.

Our research shows disengaged employees are 3.8 times more likely than their engaged counterparts to cite organizational culture as a reason for leaving. 

While most leaders agree a strong culture is key to business success, many have different ideas about what culture really is. This lack of clarity makes it difficult to make changes that move the needle. Leaders need to take a good look at the role culture plays in attracting, retaining, engaging, and empowering talent. They need to focus on the aspects of culture that drive employee, team, and business success.

Our organizational culture research offers a fresh perspective on workplace culture. It helps make clear the most critical aspects of creating an engaging and successful culture. It shows the link between culture, employee engagement, and retention. And it will help organizational leaders rethink their approach to culture in order to shape a foundation for business success.

What is organizational culture?

Culture has been historically defined as organizational norms, rituals, and values. But organizational culture is so much more than that. It’s about the day-to-day attitudes, actions, and behaviors at an organization. Essentially, it’s how work gets done within a business, including:

• The way you make decisions
• The way you communicate
• The way you celebrate employees
• The way you behave 
• The way you reward and recognize others 

Employees experience culture through many aspects of your organization. But our research shows that some aspects are felt much more powerfully than others. Culture is really about the day-to-day details of how work gets done. Here are the top ways that employees feel the culture at their organization.

50% of employees experience culture most strongly in their organization's approach to employee performance. 

The way you manage performance has a strong impact on engagement and organizational culture. How managers create alignment, communicate, recognize, and give feedback all shape an employee’s experience. Focus on performance management approaches that drive employee success and wellbeing. Read our research on creating an engaging performance management approach here >>

53% of employees feel culture most strongly through recognition and celebrations.

Employees want to feel valued for their contributions. How you recognize individuals and teams says a lot about your culture and what you value. When you publicly recognize employees for behaviors that align with your culture and values, it helps bring culture to life. 

54% of employees experience culture most strongly through their organization's mission and values. 

Your mission and values set the tone for how work gets done. If your mission is to help others, your culture might be more collaborative. If innovation is a core value, put systems in place that encourage innovation. To create a strong culture, leverage your mission and values to guide everyday initiatives.

What employees think about organizational culture 

Company culture is changing across all industries. Our research shows that while some employees believe this change is positive, others think differently. As culture continues to evolve, it impacts the employee experience in different ways than before. 

65% of employees say their company's culture has changed post-pandemic. 

35% say their culture has changed dramatically. As the workplace has changed, culture has changed too—for better or worse. Whether or not you’re actively investing in your culture, someone or something is shaping it. Leaders must keep a pulse on culture to ensure they’re driving the right changes at the right times.

2 in 3 employees say their organizational culture is "very positive." 

66% of employees say their culture positively impacts their work and behavior everyday.

Culture is a day by day, moment by moment experience. It’s key to create a culture that promotes the right outcomes and behaviors. Listen to what your employees have to say about the day to day happenings inside your organization—and make adjustments that improve their experience.

Culture—or “how work gets done”—is going to look different in your unique workplace. The way you communicate, treat each other, and make decisions can either positively impact engagement and retention, negatively impact it, or not impact it at all. 

Employees who say their culture is positive are 3.8x more likely to be engaged.

A positive culture strengthens employee engagement. When employees agree that their organizational cultures are positive, they are more likely to be highly engaged, (84%) than those who do not agree (22%).

Employees who say their culture has improved since the pandemic are 2.9x more likely to be highly engaged.

When employees say their culture has improved over the past two years, they are more likely to be highly engaged (81%) than employees who say it has declined (28%). This illustrates the link between culture and engagement. A strong culture drives employee engagement, whereas a weak culture can boost disengagement.

Disengaged employees are 2.6x more likely to leave their company for a better culture.

Roughly 60% of disengaged employees—and only 23% of engaged employees—would leave their company for a better culture. This suggests that employee engagement is the motivating factor behind retention. One of the ways to drive engagement? A positive workplace culture.

Where organizational culture thrives 

Remote and hybrid work environments are becoming the norm. While many leaders believe that culture suffers outside of the physical workplace, our research provides a different perspective. Those offered flexibility in the workplace are likely to see culture more favorably. 

Remote/hybrid employees are more likely to report a strong and positive company culture.

Only 65% of on-site employees believe their company has a strong culture, compared to over 70% of remote and hybrid workers. Only 58% of onsite employees say their culture is positive, compared to roughly 70% of remote and hybrid employees. Company culture isn’t attached to the physical workplace. In fact, it can be strengthened in a remote/hybrid environment. Giving employees the option to choose where they work fosters a culture of mutual trust and respect.

Remote/hybrid employees are more likely to say their culture has improved.

While remote (45%) and hybrid (44%) say their cultures have improved, only 37% of on-site employees say the same. Flexible work arrangements promote employee wellbeing, autonomy, work-life balance, inclusion and productivity.

Workplace employees are most likely to say their culture has declined.

28% of on-site workers say their culture has declined since the start of the pandemic. Now more than ever, employees expect flexibility, autonomy, and trust. When you can’t give your employees the option to work from home, try to find other ways for them to decide how their work gets done.

A Note on Industry Impact There are some industries and roles that are inherently less conducive to remote/hybrid work arrangements. Therefore, we explored whether other factors, like industry or company size, influence employees' perceptions of culture. While industry and company size can impact these perceptions, we found that where and how employees work has a stronger influence on their perceptions of culture. Regardless of the type of work you do, employees want a culture of flexibility and trust. That's why culture doesn't fizzle out in flexible or non-traditional work environments. 

Engaged and disengaged employees describe their cultures in different ways. But both engaged and disengaged employees know what they want—and don’t want—when it comes to culture.

No surprises here. Engaging cultures have a better reputation with talent.

It’s no surprise that engaged employees value their culture. After all, culture is a key factor behind engagement. The top words engaged employees use to describe their culture are:

• Inclusive 
• Caring 
• Collaborative

But disengaged employees have different thoughts. A few words disengaged employees use to describe their culture include:

• Disorganized
• Professional 

How employees describe an ideal culture

Regardless of engagement level, employees know what they want when it comes to culture. The top 5 words employees used to describe an ideal culture are:

1. Flexible 2. Inclusive 3. Supportive 4. Collaborative 5. Caring

To engage your employees, give them the flexibility to decide how, when, and where their work gets done. You should also prioritize inclusivity and give everyone the opportunity to succeed regardless of role, tenure or background. Regular check-ins, growth-focused coaching, and collaboration will support employee success further. Finally, ensure you show your people that you care about them as humans—not just employees. 

Who shapes organizational culture?

According to our research, employees believe leaders, managers, and HR are responsible for company culture. But to create a great culture, everyone needs to play a part. Culture should grow and evolve in a way that resonates with each employee, regardless of role. 

Employees believe that leaders and managers are responsible for culture.  

Culture starts at the top. In fact,  Leaders should clearly define culture, communicate about it regularly, set a good example, and tie business outcomes to company values. This will empower employees to practice, develop, and evolve cultural norms.   

57% of employees believe HR is responsible for creating company culture. 

Many employees expect HR to shape company culture. But while HR is probably trying to create culture, they need leadership and employees to support their efforts. Without company-wide adoption, you won’t see the culture change you want. 

57% of employees believe individual contributors are responsible for shaping culture. 

Each individual plays a part in culture. To create a strong culture, employees must understand and live out their culture, mission, and values. They must collaborate, recognize, communicate, and behave in a way that aligns with cultural norms. 

Everyone plays a part in culture. The healthiest cultures are shaped by every person within an organization. And the job of creating culture is never done. As your organization changes, it’s important to be intentional about how those changes impact culture.

A healthy culture looks different for everyone. Leaders should keep their unique business problems and opportunities in mind when creating a culture strategy. Shape your approach with these tips to foster a culture of engagement, performance, and long-term success.

1. Aim your culture strategies at engagement. 

A healthy culture drives employee engagement first and foremost. When you evaluate “how work gets done” at your organization, try to understand how each aspect could impact employee engagement. Engagement is all about connecting employees to their work, team, and organization—ensure your culture strategies do the same. 

2. Evolve your approach to employee performance. 

Employees say performance management is a key component of culture. With the right practices, you can drive alignment, motivation, growth, and engagement. With the wrong approach, you risk toxicity, distrust, and burnout. Use performance management as a tool to strengthen culture with continuous feedback, effective communication, company-wide alignment, and fairness and transparency.  

3. Focus on driving trust-building leadership practices.

To create a culture of trust , clearly outline your organization’s vision, strategy, progress, and goals. Leaders should communicate frequently and transparently to prevent employee confusion or resentment when change happens. Continue this communication when you gather employee feedback too, explaining how feedback was used—or why it wasn’t. Finally, allow employees to see leaders as real people—genuine relationships are needed to foster genuine trust. 

4. Weave employee recognition into all that you do.

Recognition happens in the way you communicate, promote, compensate, assign work, and provide opportunities. Build a system that recognizes behaviors critical to your organizational culture. You should prioritize authenticity when you recognize employees and tailor your communication to each individual. Employee recognition should happen every day—a simple thank you goes a long way. 

5. Invest in tech that helps you see, understand, and act on culture. 

A robust employee engagement, performance, and people analytics platform will outline the big picture behind your culture and help you understand where to focus and when. With the right tools, you can uncover deep insights, measure employee perceptions, and create a thriving culture. 

Every employee in the company builds culture. That's why it's crucial for every aspect of your business to intentionally reflect the culture you want your organization to have. 

Employee success tools and technology make it easy for your employees to contribute positively to your culture in their day-to-day tasks, goals, communication, and celebrations.

We make it easy to grow, develop, and retain your best talent.

Lack of career growth and development is one of the primary reasons employees leave their organization. Employees don’t want to feel stagnant. If they do, the result is a lack of engagement and impact. It is crucial to leverage tools that help managers and employees map and track development together.

We make it easy to connect and celebrate meaningfully. 

Your culture comes to life through the ways you celebrate and recognize your employees. Building a culture of connection and appreciation centered around your organization’s core values not only boosts employee morale, but also engagement and impact.

We make it easy to predict and prevent turnover.

You need to take a targeted approach to analyzing turnover and retention. To move from reacting to turnover to proactively addressing it, you have to understand what drives top talent to leave and continuously implement strategies to retain your best employees.

We make it easy to stand out and compete for talent.

Employees are your most vital asset. You need to have a dynamic strategy in place to stand out against your competitors and attract top talent. Benchmarking can help you understand the strengths and opportunities of your employee value proposition compared to your competitors. Transform your EVP into one that cannot be imitated.

Survey Methodology

The research from this report was derived from the   Best Places to Work   contest—powered by Quantum Workplace. This nationwide contest measures the employee experience of over 1 million voices across thousands of the most successful organizations in the United States.

From this respondent pool, we conduct an opt-in, independent research panel with over 32,000 individuals who share their workplace experiences. This unique vantage point gives us the ability to understand workplace trends to supply insights that help other organizations succeed.

Learn how to build a magnetic culture by making culture easier for you and your teams!

Published August 22, 2023 | Written By Kristin Ryba

Related Content

14 One on One Meeting Topics You Should Be Discussing With Employees

Quick links.

• Performance
• Intelligence

Subscribe to Our Blog

View more resources on Company Culture

The Ultimate Guide to Company Culture [2022 Edition]

10 minute read

15 Diversity and Inclusion Best Practices for Bridging the D&I Gap

6 minute read

How Your Unwritten Rules are Harming Your Inclusive Culture

2 minute read

• All Resources
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• Terms of Service

Smart. Open. Grounded. Inventive. Read our Ideas Made to Matter.

Which program is right for you?

Through intellectual rigor and experiential learning, this full-time, two-year MBA program develops leaders who make a difference in the world.

A rigorous, hands-on program that prepares adaptive problem solvers for premier finance careers.

A 12-month program focused on applying the tools of modern data science, optimization and machine learning to solve real-world business problems.

Earn your MBA and SM in engineering with this transformative two-year program.

Combine an international MBA with a deep dive into management science. A special opportunity for partner and affiliate schools only.

A doctoral program that produces outstanding scholars who are leading in their fields of research.

Bring a business perspective to your technical and quantitative expertise with a bachelor’s degree in management, business analytics, or finance.

A joint program for mid-career professionals that integrates engineering and systems thinking. Earn your master’s degree in engineering and management.

An interdisciplinary program that combines engineering, management, and design, leading to a master’s degree in engineering and management.

Executive Programs

A full-time MBA program for mid-career leaders eager to dedicate one year of discovery for a lifetime of impact.

This 20-month MBA program equips experienced executives to enhance their impact on their organizations and the world.

Non-degree programs for senior executives and high-potential managers.

A non-degree, customizable program for mid-career professionals.

The AI Playbook: 6 steps for launching predictive AI projects

5 ‘extraordinary turnarounds’ for global well-being

Close proximity is the key to knowledge spillovers among startups

Credit: zhikun sun / iStock

Ideas Made to Matter

Organizational Culture

MIT Sloan research on organizational culture

Kara Baskin

Jul 25, 2022

COVID-19 has upended traditional working arrangements: Remote and hybrid work have expanded geographic possibilities, while abbreviated work weeks and flex time have changed the parameters of the traditional workday and workers’ expectations.

In this new era, leaders at every level of the enterprise are struggling to articulate an organizational culture that’s right for this new moment.

Here’s what MIT Sloan experts and researchers think are the key steps to building an organizational culture that works now and into the future.

Embrace distributed leadership

Smart organizations are shifting from command-and-control leadership to distributed leadership, which MIT Sloan professor Deborah Ancona defines as collaborative, autonomous practices managed by a network of formal and informal leaders across an organization.

The practice gives people autonomy to innovate and uses noncoercive means to align them around a common goal, a structure that’s highly appealing to employees who are used to being autonomous and empowered.

“Top leaders are flipping the hierarchy upside down,” said MIT Sloan lecturer Kate Isaacs,  who collaborates with Ancona on research about teams and nimble leadership.

“Their job isn't to be the smartest people in the room who have all the answers,” Isaacs said, “but rather to architect the gameboard where as many people as possible have permission to contribute the best of their expertise, their knowledge, their skills, and their ideas.”

Nurture a digital workforce …

To transform a traditional workforce into one that is future-ready, leaders should equip workers with the technologies they need and give them the accountability and capabilities to fully exploit those tools, according to Kristine Dery, an academic research fellow with the MIT Center for Information Systems Research .

Companies should aim to make their employees empowered problem solvers, Dery said, by creating a supportive environment of continual and rapid learning where they can leverage technologies to solve unpredictable problems. These employees need to have confidence to solve problems, and the skills to work effectively in a digital world. 

This isn’t just a nice idea in theory: Companies that invest in the right experience for their people, and make sure they are ready for the future, tend to outperform their competitors. On average they deliver 19% more growth in revenue than their competitors and have 15% more profit. These companies are also more innovative, better at cross-selling, and deliver a significantly better customer experience, Dery said.

… but don’t ignore employee hierarchies

The ascension of junior employees needs to be handled with care. In a tech-first world, younger workers often possess more savvy than older colleagues — but quickly promoting them could create friction with senior co-workers, noted MIT Sloan work and organization studies professor Kate Kellogg.  She recommends creating peer-training programs that rotate both senior and junior employees through the role of trainer.

Strive for managers who understand nimble leadership

Nimble organizations are filled with people who feel free to step forward, propose new ideas, and translate them into action. Isaacs, Ancona, and co-researcher Elaine Backman have identified three types of leaders in a nimble organization:

• Entrepreneurial — lower- to mid-level idea generators who inspire trust through technical expertise and reputational credibility.
• Enabling — often middle managers who are good connectors and communicators and who remove obstacles for entrepreneurial leaders.
• Architecting — often high-level leaders who shape culture, structure, and values.

“In a lot of companies ‘purpose’ becomes a motto on the wall, it's not really lived, it’s just lip service,” Isaacs said during an MIT Sloan Executive Education webinar on nimble leadership . “In nimble organizations, [managers] are good at bringing the purpose down off the wall and into daily decision making.”

Turn to middle managers to help promote DEI

Nearly all companies have increased their efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Research from Stephanie Creary , an assistant professor at The Wharton School, shows middle managers will be especially important when promoting diversity and inclusion within a workforce.

Speaking last year at the MIT Sloan Management Review Work/22  event, Creary explained that executives and senior managers are often motivated by market position and competition, but middle managers are typically focused on their team and its performance, making them ideal champions of DEI efforts.

Build a culture that supports remote teams

In their book “ Remote, Inc. ,” MIT Sloan senior lecturer Robert Pozen and  co-author Alexandra Samuel, offer ways for managers to effectively communicate with and encourage productivity in their remote employees.

The authors recommend four tools: ground rules, team meetings, one-on-ones, and performance reviews.

“Even experienced managers face new challenges when they first start managing an all or partially remote team,” the authors write. “You need to ensure your team gets its work done, but you also need to put some extra thought and TLC into managing the issues that crop up for remote workers, like personal isolation and trouble communicating with colleagues.”

Strengthen the link between worker well-being and company goals

Research by MIT Sloan professor Erin Kelly, co-author of  “ Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do about It ,” finds that happier employees are more likely to be engaged, enthusiastic about work, and likely to stay at their jobs.

To promote employee satisfaction, companies should consider pursuing a dual-agenda work redesign — that is, an action plan that links employees’ well-being and experience with a company’s priorities and goals.

A dual-agenda design prompts employees and managers to look at how work can be changed in ways that benefit employees and their families, and also the organization.

“Work redesign is not a change in company policy, it is an effort to construct a new normal, to reconsider and revamp how a team does its work,” Kelly said. “Dual agenda refers to the fact that these changes address both organizational concerns (working effectively) and employee concerns (working in ways that are more sustainable and reflect their personal and family priorities and protect their health).”

Related Articles

Culture: 4 keys to why it matters

Delivers large-scale performance-improvement programs that foster culture change and counsels senior executives making leadership transitions

March 27, 2018 What separates the highest performing organizations from the rest? Clever strategy? Superior products? Better people?

Perhaps they do – for a while – but any advantage fades if it is not built atop something more fundamental. Something that enables a competitive advantage to sustain and grow over time. That something is culture .

What is culture?

Culture starts with what people do and how they do it. In any industry, what people do may not differ dramatically, but high-performing organizations distinguish themselves in how they do it. This cumulative effect of what is done and how it is done ultimately determines an organization’s performance.

Culture also encompasses why people do what they do. As the Titanic’s captain grasped a little too late on that fateful night in 1912, 90 percent of an iceberg’s mass lies beneath the surface. Culture is similar as it includes observable behaviors (the what and how above the surface) as well as everything underneath – the shared mindsets and beliefs that influence how people in an organization behave. Just like a captain navigating frigid waters, anyone trying to understand an organization’s culture must recognize that most of what matters cannot be readily seen.

Thus, culture is the common set of behaviors and underlying mindsets and beliefs that shape how people work and interact day to day.

Four reasons why culture matters

• Culture correlates with performance. Based on our research of over 1,000 organizations that encompass more than three million individuals, those with top quartile cultures (as measured by our Organizational Health Index ) post a return to shareholders 60 percent higher than median companies and 200 percent higher than those in the bottom quartile.
• Culture is inherently difficult to copy. The quickening pace of innovation means that products and business models face the constant threat of being replicated. In this environment, the ultimate competitive advantage is a healthy culture that adapts automatically to changing conditions to find new ways to succeed.
• Healthy cultures enable organizations to adapt. In a world where the one constant is change, culture becomes even more important because organizations with high-performing cultures thrive on change. The converse also holds true: Unhealthy cultures do not respond well to change. Our research shows that 70 percent of transformations fail, and 70 percent of those failures are due to culture-related issues.
• Unhealthy cultures lead to underperformance…or worse. Over time, not only do unhealthy cultures foster lackluster performance, but they can be your undoing. Daily headlines attest, culture can bring corporate giants to their knees.

This topic – how to create healthier and higher-performing cultures – is one we will explore in more detail in subsequent posts.

Learn more about our People & Organizational Performance Practice

Corporate Culture

Corporate culture is an omnibus term that includes many elements like norms, values, knowledge, and customs that are relevant to a firm. Economists have made great progress recently in devising methods of measuring different aspects of corporate culture. These empirical measures of culture have explained mergers and acquisitions, corporate risk-taking, and unethical behaviors observed in corporations, among other topics. We argue that unpacking corporate culture into its components is the right way to research it empirically. Theories of corporate culture are still in development, and we discuss the major contributions thus far. We argue that a theory of the firm and of corporate decision-making that is based on corporate culture is more germane to the practical realities of firms’ inner workings than prevailing theories based on agency costs. Corporate culture has the potential to set the theoretical paradigm for all corporate finance research.

Gorton, Grennan, and Zentefis have nothing to disclose. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

Download Citation Data

Published Versions

Working groups, more from nber.

In addition to working papers , the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter , the NBER Digest , the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability , the Bulletin on Health , and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship  — as well as online conference reports , video lectures , and interviews .

• Data, AI, & Machine Learning
• Managing Technology
• Social Responsibility
• Workplace, Teams, & Culture
• AI & Machine Learning
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Big ideas Research Projects
• Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy
• Responsible AI
• Future of the Workforce
• Future of Leadership
• All Research Projects
• AI in Action
• Most Popular
• The Truth Behind the Nursing Crisis
• Coaching for the Future-Forward Leader

Measuring Culture

• Pride Month

Our summer 2024 issue highlights ways to better support customers, partners, and employees, while our special report shows how organizations can advance their AI practice.

• Past Issues
• Upcoming Events
• Video Archive
• Me, Myself, and AI
• Three Big Points

When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk?

Company practices often conflict with corporate values. closing the gap starts with communication..

• Data, AI, & Machine Learning
• Organizational Structure
• Developing Strategy
• Analytics & Business Intelligence

When Johnson & Johnson’s CEO codified the company’s principles into a credo in 1943, corporate value statements were a novelty. Today they are ubiquitous among large corporations. In our study of nearly 700 large companies, we found that more than 80% published an official set of corporate values on their website. 1 Senior leaders, in particular, love to talk about their company culture. Over the past three decades, more than three-quarters of CEOs interviewed in a major business magazine discussed their company’s culture or core values — even when not specifically asked about it. 2

Corporate values statements are nearly universal, but do they matter? Critics dismiss them as cheap talk with no impact on employees’ day-to-day behavior. Recent corporate scandals support the skeptics’ view. Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, and Barclays each included ethics or integrity among their core values in the years before their wrongdoings were discovered, while Boeing hit the trifecta by listing integrity, quality, and safety among its “enduring values.”

Get Updates on Transformative Leadership

Evidence-based resources that can help you lead your team more effectively, delivered to your inbox monthly.

Please enter a valid email address

Thank you for signing up

Privacy Policy

It is tempting to dismiss corporate value statements as irrelevant, but ignoring them is a mistake. Even when companies fall short of their aspirations, official statements still cast light on the values leaders consider critical for success. They also spell out the cultural elements that leaders believe distinguish their company in the eyes of employees, customers, and other stakeholders.

Official corporate values only matter to the extent they shape employees’ activities and decisions on a day-to-day basis. This raises a fundamental question: How well does behavior inside a company align with cultural aspirations? In other words, when it comes to their core values, do companies walk the talk?

To measure the gap between aspiration and action, we collected the official corporate values statements for more than 500 large organizations and compared these official values with how employees view their companies on common corporate values based on an analysis of more than 1.2 million Glassdoor reviews.

What Companies Aspire To

Corporate culture means different things to different people. There are more than 50 distinct definitions in the academic literature, including the stories employees tell to interpret events, organizational rituals, and corporate symbols. 3 The official culture statements we studied, in contrast, display a striking consistency in how they define corporate culture.

Three-quarters of the culture statements include an introduction explaining the role of corporate culture. The primary function of corporate culture, according to these descriptions, is to guide the actions and decisions of employees throughout the organization. 4 Aligning behavior with official culture allows companies to differentiate themselves from competitors, build trust with stakeholders, increase brand equity, and attract great talent.

Nearly all the organizations we studied rely on a set of core values as the guideposts for helping employees align their behavior with corporate culture. Of the companies in our sample, 72% referred to their company’s culture as values or core values, and even employees at companies that use other labels — principles, philosophy, or ideals, for example — cited values as the foundation of their culture. The realities of how companies talk about their culture is consistent with a prominent theory that defines organizational culture as “a set of norms and values that are widely shared and strongly held throughout the organization.” 5 We’ll use this definition of corporate culture throughout this paper.

The typical company lists a handful of values — the most common number of reported values is five, and nearly three-quarters of companies in our sample listed between three and seven values. (See “How Many Corporate Values Do Companies Have?”) Companies are not, however, always disciplined in spelling out their core values. Ten percent of organizations listed two or more sets of values under different names (core values and corporate culture, for example) on different parts of their website. Others packed multiple values into a single item. JP Morgan Chase’s business principles, for example, included “a commitment to integrity, fairness, and responsibility,” which we count as three distinct values. When we accounted for nested values, the average company in our sample listed seven distinct values.

One of the most striking findings of our analysis is the sheer number and diversity of values cited. We identified 62 distinct values mentioned by at least 1% of the companies with official values statements. Integrity was the most common, listed by 65% of all companies, followed by collaboration (53%), customer focus (48%), and respect (35%). No other value was cited by more than one-third of companies, and the list contains a long tail of values mentioned by less than 10% of companies. (See “What Companies Say They Value.”)

While some values are more common than others, none are universal. Even integrity, the most frequently cited, is listed by less than two-thirds of all organizations in our sample. The lack of universal values is explained, in part, by variance across industries. All of the companies in the construction and engineering and health care services industries, for example, included integrity among their core values, while less than 20% of internet companies did so. (See “Stated Corporate Values Vary Across Industries.”) Even within the same industry, however, we observed significant variation in the choice of core values.

The diversity of values calls into question the usefulness of frameworks that attempt to reduce all corporate cultures to a handful of universal types. One popular model, for example, argues that all corporate cultures can be plotted along two dimensions — internal versus external orientation on one dimension and flexibility versus control on the other. 6 The cultures that correspond to the resulting quadrants — clan, ad-hocracy, market, and hierarchy — are presented as archetypes that describe all corporate cultures.

While these dimensions are important elements of corporate culture, the resulting two-by-two matrix cannot easily accommodate crucial values like integrity, diversity, or psychological safety. Other models choose different dimensions and produce other cultural archetypes, but they face the same fundamental challenge. 7 No two dimensions can or should be able to capture the richness and diversity of corporate cultures that companies attempt to achieve. Trying to force diverse corporate values onto a cultural Procrustean bed, moreover, strips them of the very elements that make them distinctive.

Do Companies Walk the Talk?

More than 80% of large American corporations publish their official corporate values. But do these professed values make a difference? If a company singles out teamwork as a core value, for example, are employees more likely to collaborate with one another compared with a company in the same industry that does not include collaboration among its core values?

To address whether stated values shape employee behavior, we first measured what companies say they value. The simplest way to quantify corporate culture would be to treat each value as binary — a company either listed it as a core value or did not. When Charles Schwab lists innovation as one of four core values, it is presumably more focused on it than Quicken Loans, which includes innovation among a laundry list of 19 elements of its culture.

To quantify each company’s relative focus on a value, we weighted it by the inverse of the total number of values listed. 8 So innovation was weighted at 25% for Charles Schwab and 5% for Quicken Loans. (A company that didn’t list a specific value received a weighting of zero for that value.) To control for differences across sectors, we assigned each company to one of 33 industries. 9 We then ranked each company in its industry based on the weighting for each value we measured.

To assess how well companies live up to their stated values, we used data from the 2019 Culture 500 , which ranks companies on nine of the most commonly cited values. Every Culture 500 company received a sentiment score that measured how positively employees talked about a specific value in the free text of their Glassdoor reviews. 10 If half the employees who discussed integrity in a company spoke about it in positive terms, for example, that company’s sentiment score for integrity would be 50%.

Comparing the rankings from the Culture 500 with official corporate values allowed us to measure the correlation between them. 11 The figure below shows the correlation coefficients (with 95% confidence intervals) between official and actual values. 12 The analysis reveals that there is no correlation between the cultural values a company emphasizes in its published statements and how well the company lives up to those values in the eyes of employees. All of the correlations between official and actual values were very weak, and four of the nine — collaboration, customer orientation, execution, and diversity — were negatively correlated.

Values Should Be Actionable, Distinctive, and Linked to Results

Our research reveals a gap between official values and the cultural reality on the ground in most organizations, which raises the question of how leaders can close that gap. As a first step, leaders can communicate corporate values more effectively by providing concrete guidance on desired behavior, ensuring their organizational values are distinctive, and linking them to outcomes that matter to employees. Effective communication cannot, of course, guarantee a healthy culture on its own. But it’s a good place to start.

Provide behavioral guidelines. Most employees would agree in principle that integrity, respect, and innovation are worthwhile values. They might have very different notions, however, about what these abstract terms mean in practice. Leaders can provide additional guidance by spelling out a handful of expected behaviors consistent with each value. To the extent these guidelines shape behavior across all parts of the organization, they provide a consistent framework for different functions, business units, and teams to coordinate their activities.

Biotechnology company Biogen, for example, includes pioneering among the elements of its corporate culture. Pioneering is an inspirational value to be sure, but one that employees might struggle to operationalize without further guidance. To clarify what pioneering means in practice, Biogen offers examples, including “We encourage candor to test assumptions and uncover the best ideas” and “We are open about what we do not know and ask questions to understand.” (See “Behavioral Guidelines for Innovation.”) Amazon and Nvidia, two of the highest-ranking companies on innovation in the Culture 500, likewise provide employees with concrete guidelines on how employees can incorporate innovation into their daily activities.

Articulate what makes your organization distinctive. A company’s core values should capture its unique identity — the enduring essence of the company that distinguishes it from competitors. 13 When employees identify with a distinctive culture, they are more likely to incorporate core values in their daily activities and pursue their organization’s goals. 14 A distinctive corporate culture can also differentiate an organization from competitors and provide a source of sustainable competitive advantage. 15

Unfortunately, many organizations’ core values are so generic that they could easily serve as fodder for a Dilbert cartoon (there are more than 50 lampooning official culture statements). 16 The core values of pharmaceutical supplier McKesson (integrity, customer-first, excellence, respect, and accountability) could apply equally well to an airline, grocery store, or bank.

How can leaders translate common values, like customer-centricity or integrity, into something distinctive? One approach is to translate abstract values into organization-specific behavioral guidelines. Alaska Airlines and McKinsey & Co. both emphasize customer service. The specific behaviors associated with their values, however, are tailored to their respective industries and strategies. Alaska Airlines offers tactics for front-line employees dealing with passengers, such as “engage with kindness” and “offer assistance.” McKinsey’s guidelines, including “use our global network to deliver the best of the firm to all clients” and “build client capabilities to sustain improvement” are appropriate for a professional services company serving global clients.

The McKinsey example illustrates another way to make values distinctive — by elaborating on desired behaviors in language unique to an organization. Within McKinsey, “follow the top management approach” means thinking through an issue for the client organization as a whole, rather than its impact on a single division or function. That phrase, and others like “obligation to dissent,” have been used for decades, have a well-defined meaning within the company, and constitute part of the company’s distinctive legacy.

Another approach is to take common values as a given, but then highlight those elements of corporate culture that differentiate an organization. Netflix, for example, acknowledges that integrity, respect, and collaboration are important, but emphasizes five values that distinguish the company including “encourage independent decision-making by employees” and “share information openly, broadly, and deliberately.”

Clarifying what your values mean in practice and providing insight into what truly differentiates your corporate culture requires hard work. Linguistic gimmicks are no substitute for effort and insight. Appending adjectives like “ferocious,” “unflinching,” or “relentless” will not make values more distinctive or actionable. Leaders also do well to avoid acronyms that force fit values. Would Discover Financial Services, for example, have included “volunteerism” (the “V” in its DISCOVER values) or Hilton Hotels “now” (the “N” in HILTON) if these companies went by different names?

Explain why your values matter. Official statements of culture signal what matters most to an organization, and behavioral cues provide concrete guidance on how to translate values into actions. Leaders can further clarify their organization’s values and what makes them distinctive by spelling out why they matter. Of the companies that publish corporate culture statements, less than one-quarter include any discussion of how those values help the organization succeed. And most of those companies simply assert culture is a competitive advantage without explaining the link between core values and organizational performance.

A handful of companies, in contrast, explicitly spell out the connection between their culture and desired results. A common rationale links corporate culture with a company’s ability to attract, retain, and energize the best employees. HubSpot — the No. 1 company on Glassdoor’s list of best places to work in 2020 — explains its “culture doesn’t just help attract amazing people, it amplifies their abilities and helps them do their best work.” Where companies choose to publish their core values provides a clue as to why they matter. One in five companies publish values on the section of their website targeted at potential employees. Their culture statements often include values, such as respect, diversity, learning, and caring, that are attractive to many job seekers.

Nearly the same percentage of companies (18%) include core values in their code of business conduct, which, unsurprisingly, emphasizes integrity, honesty, fairness, and strict compliance with applicable laws. Deutsche Bank, for example, underscores the importance of integrity in rebuilding trust with key stakeholders: “By living these values and beliefs in daily interactions with our stakeholders, employees have a critical role to play in helping us to restore the trust lost during the financial crisis.”

Companies can also spell out the link between values, behaviors, and performance. Netflix explains that employees are expected to be “extraordinarily candid with one another” because “we will learn faster and be better if we can make giving and receiving feedback less stressful and a more normal part of work life.” 17 The company’s value of “avoid rules” is, according to Netflix, critical to maintaining agility in the face of changing market circumstances.

Explaining the rationale behind specific values helps employees (and other stakeholders) understand why the organization prizes certain values above others. Illinois Tool Works’ emphasis on decentralization and entrepreneurship is appropriate for a diversified conglomerate, for example, but would not suit a global professional services company that needs to collaborate across offices and practice groups to serve multinational clients. Clarifying the purpose of values also makes it easier to measure whether they are working. HubSpot, for example, could track attrition among employees they want to keep to assess whether their culture is doing its job.

Leaders love to talk about corporate culture. Many companies, however, display a disconnect between what leaders preach and what is practiced throughout the organization. Improving corporate culture is a long journey that demands a holistic approach and sustained effort over time. During the next year, the Culture 500 project will publish a steady stream of content exploring how leaders can build and sustain a healthy corporate culture.

Related Articles

As first steps in improving their culture, leaders can take a hard, evidence-based look at how well their organization is living up to its espoused values. Which elements of your culture are working well? Which are falling short? Where are the pockets of cultural excellence within your organization? Which teams are undermining your culture?

A cultural diagnostic may reveal that your values are too abstract, generic, or divorced from results to shape how employees act on a day-to-day basis. In this case, you may want to refresh your core values to make sure they capture the distinctive essence of your organization, provide concrete behavioral guidelines, and clearly link to outcomes that matter to employees.

About the Authors

Donald Sull ( @culturexinsight ) is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder of CultureX. Stefano Turconi is a teaching fellow at the London Business School. Charles Sull is a cofounder of CultureX.

1. An earlier study of companies included in the S&P 500 index in 2011 found that 85% published corporate values on their website. See L. Guiso, P. Sapienza, and L. Zingales, “The Value of Corporate Culture,” Journal of Financial Economics 117, no. 1 (2015): 60-76.

2. We identified all interviews in Harvard Business Review published between January 1990 and December 2019, and excluded anyone who was not the CEO of a for-profit organization with more than 250 employees at the time of the interview. We searched the text of the remaining interviews for mentions of culture, core values, or other phrases indicating the interviewee was discussing corporate culture.

3. W. Verbeke, M. Volgering, and M. Hessels, “Exploring the Conceptual Expansion Within the Field of Organizational Behavior: Organizational Climate and Organizational Culture,” Journal of Management Studies 35, no. 3 (May 1998): 303-329 identified 54 definitions of organizational culture. For a terrific overview of the current state of corporate culture literature, see J.A. Chatman and C.A. O’Reilly, “Paradigm Lost: Reinvigorating the Study of Organizational Culture,” Research in Organizational Behavior 36 (November 2016): 199-224.

4. More than 80% of the explanations of corporate culture in our sample explicitly discussed the role of corporate values as guides to behavior.

5. C.A. O’Reilly and J.A. Chatman, “Culture as Social Control: Corporations, Cults, and Commitment,” Research in Organizational Behavior 18, eds. B.M. Staw and L.L. Cummings (Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1996): 166.

6. K.S. Cameron, R.E. Quinn, J. DeGraff, et al., “Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations” (Northampton, Mass: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006).

7. T.E. Deal and A.A. Kennedy, “Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life,” (New York: Penguin, 1992); R. Goffee and G. Jones, “What Holds the Modern Company Together?” Harvard Business Review 74, no. 6 (November-December 1996); and B. Groysberg, J. Lee, J. Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng, “The Culture Factor,” Harvard Business Review 96, no. 1 (January-February 2018).

8. When weighting each value, we used the number of values we coded for each company (average of seven per company) rather than the number of values reported by the company (five per company on average). This adjustment allowed us to account for companies that incorporated multiple values into a single item in their official values statements and more accurately reflects their level of focus on any value.

9. The list of industries can be found at the Culture 500 website. Companies like Johnson & Johnson, which competes in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and consumer goods, were assigned to multiple industries.

10. A company’s sentiment score for a value was calculated as the number of reviews that discussed a value in positive terms divided by the total number of reviews that mentioned that value.

11. This analysis applied to companies that were both included in the Culture 500 and that had published official values statements. Of the 531 organizations in the 2019 Culture 500 sample, 444 (84%) had official culture statements. Some of the Culture 500 values included cultural items that we classified as distinct cultural items when coding official value statements. The Culture 500 value of agility, for example, included topics of agility, speed, entrepreneurial, change, and simplicity. In calculating the weighting of official corporate values, we consolidated those values to ensure consistency with the Culture 500 data.

12. We tested the association between officially stated values and employees’ assessment of those values in practice using Pearson’s rho. The correlations had a p-value less than 0.01 for agility and innovation, below 0.05 for respect, and was above 0.05 for all other values. Many companies did not list a specific value, which resulted in many tied value rankings within an industry. We used the Kendall rank correlation to calculate correlations in the presence of ties. The correlations coefficients using the two methods were virtually identical.

13. David Whetten defines organizational identity as “the central and enduring attributes of an organization that distinguish it from other organizations, ” D.A. Whetten, “Albert and Whetten Revisited: Strengthening the Concept of Organizational Identity,” Journal of Management Inquiry 15, no. 3 (September 2006): 219-234.

14. J.E. Dutton, J.M. Dukerich, and C.V. Harquail, “Organizational Images and Member Identification,” Administrative Science Quarterly 39, no. 2 (June 1994): 239-263; and M. Riketta, and R. van Dick, “Foci of Attachment in Organizations: A Meta-analytic Comparison of the Strength and Correlates of Workgroup Versus Organizational Identification and Commitment,” Journal of Vocational Behavior 67, no. 3 (December 2005): 490–510.

15. J.B. Barney, “Organizational Culture: Can It Be a Source of Sustained Competitive Advantage?” The Academy of Management Review 11, no. 3 (July 1986): 656-665.

16. A search of Dilbert cartoons produced 44 comic strips for culture and seven for core values, https://dilbert.com , accessed March 15, 2019.

17. “Netflix Culture,” Netflix, accessed March 17, 2020, https://jobs.netflix.com .

i. We searched websites and annual reports between March and July 2018. We classified as corporate value statements any list of two or more items that were labeled as culture, values, principles, philosophy, norms, beliefs, creed, credo, ethos, attitudes, way, tenets, or commandments. We only included lists of items that were clearly separated from the main text of the website or document through, for example, bullet points, separate lines, item titles, etc. This allowed us to avoid subjective assessments of whether text embedded in a paragraph was discussing corporate culture. We excluded mission and vision statements that laid out an organization’s desired future without specifying the values that would guide behavior.

ii. In some cases, we could not code a value based on the value title alone. Aon Hewitt, for example, listed head as one of its core values. In these cases, we read the value description (if available) to identify what the company meant. If the explanation included more than one value, we coded for all of these. In the Aon Hewitt example, head was described as “Integrity and professionalism are the pillars of our business. Our commitment to rigorous standards and innovation assures clients of bespoke valued solutions,” which we coded to four values (integrity, professionalism, innovation, and customer orientation).

iii. Our list is broadly consistent with the Organizational Culture Profile, a compendium of corporate values widely used by management scholars that lists more than 60 distinct values. In the late 1980s, the development of the Organizational Culture Profile (OCP) summarized the most common values found in academic and managerial writing at that time. C.A. O’Reilly, J. Chatman, and D.F. Caldwell, “People and Organizational Culture: A Profile Comparison Approach to Assessing Person-Organization Fit,” Academy of Management Journal 34, no. 3 (September 1991): 487-516. In a later study, they added 10 new value statements that did not appear in the original OCP, mostly dealing with customer orientation (three) and integrity (three). C.A. O’Reilly, D.F. Caldwell, J.A. Chatman, et al., “The Promise and Problems of Organizational Culture: CEO Personality, Culture, and Firm Performance,” Group and Organization Management 39, no. 6 (December 2014): 595-625. Seventy-five percent of the values listed by companies we studied were also included among the superset of OCP values enumerated by O’Reilly and Chatman across their two studies.

iv. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the retail trade sector and accommodation and food services sector together employed over 30 million employees in 2018 versus a total employed population of 161 million.

More Like This

Add a comment cancel reply.

You must sign in to post a comment. First time here? Sign up for a free account : Comment on articles and get access to many more articles.

• Open access
• Published: 18 June 2024

What constitutes an employer of choice? A qualitative triangulation investigation

• Mohamed Mohiya   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6701-3071 1  

Human Resources for Health volume  22 , Article number:  41 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

44 Accesses

1 Altmetric

Metrics details

Employer of choice (EOC) is a relatively new phenomenon, particularly in Human Resources Management. Existing employees and prospective talent have reasons and expectations to designate an employer as an EOC. While EOC has received extensive attention from both academics and practitioners over the past few years, the work has mostly focused on managerial and marketing perspectives, and thus far lacks a strong theoretical foundation. Drawing on Social Exchange Theory (SET), based on Human Resources and employees’ perceptions and experiences, this research aims to explore and investigate the factors that constitute/designate an employer as an Employer of Choice EOC. Two qualitative triangulated data sets were collected from existing full-time employees at a Saudi multinational corporation: open interviews and document analysis (cross-sectional and longitudinal). Thematic analysis (TA) was employed to analyze both methods. The findings reveal that company image, training, and development, satisfaction, involvement and commitment, fairness, work culture, reward, opportunities for growth, teamwork, motivation, and corporate social responsibility are the factors that lead employees to designate an employer as an EOC. This research contributes to knowledge conceptually, theoretically, and empirically, mainly in the area of Human Resources Management. This research represents one of the first studies to empirically identify and investigate employee-related factors and evaluate them all together in a multinational Saudi organization. Recognizing the findings of this empirical-based research assists HR managers in designating their organizations as an EOC for current employees and prospective talents.

Peer Review reports

Introduction and research background

One of the top priority goals that strategic HR focusing is to make their organizations designated as Employer of Choice (EOC) to attract and retain talents. In the past few years, companies around the globe have experienced some competition in attracting talented employees [ 58 ]. Companies, therefore, utilise their resources to become an employer of choice [ 47 ]. The war for talent has become one of the top issues for strategic human resources [ 67 ]. One strategy that is likely to become a winner in this talent competition is inducing employees to designate an employer as an Employer of Choice (EOC) [ 50 , 59 ].

The very existence of the concept of an EOC suggests that employees deliberately choose to work for an EOC instead of for other companies [ 20 ]. However, as a concept, Employer of Choice (EOC) is still a relatively new phenomenon, particularly in Human Resources. Based on an analysis of the literature, there are other similar concepts, such as employer branding. Ambler and Barrow [ 1 ], who coined the term “employer brand”, conceptualized it “as the package of functional, economic and psychological benefits provided by employment, and identified with the employing company” (p. xvi). Backhaus and Tikoo [ 4 ] defined employer branding as “a targeted, long-term strategy to manage awareness and perceptions of employees, potential employees, and related stakeholders with regards to a particular organization” (p. 2). Employer branding has further been conceptualized as “a targeted, long-term strategy to manage the awareness and perceptions of employees, potential employees, and related stakeholders with regards to the particular firm” (Sullivan, 2004: 1). In addition, employer branding has been conceptualized as “as building an image of an organization to distinct and desirable employers” ([ 24 ], 48). Nevertheless, like many others, these conceptions in the stream of research on the employer of choice have focused on organizational and managerial perspectives to achieve organizations’ strategic goals. Most importantly, the research has clearly neglected employees’ issues. The present research defines Employer of Choice as the needs and expectations that attract employees to designate an employer as an Employer of Choice.

From the employees’ perspective, it can be considered that an EOC is a place where they are interested in or enthusiastic about working while existing employees are interested in continuing in that workplace and are content with the facilities available. According to Armstrong [ 2 ], employer branding creates EOCs for individuals and instills in them the desire to continue with a given employer. In a different dimension, an employer of choice is summed up by the popular phrase “a great place to work”.

From organizations’ perspectives, there is increasing competitiveness in the job market and the race for talent has generated a requirement on the side of the employers to prove themselves worthy by engaging in different strategies to retain and attract potentially talented people. It has become necessary for employers to attract and retain competent and enthusiastic employees so that all stakeholders are satisfied and the organization is capable of contributing towards business success. Numerous mechanisms are adopted by employers to transform themselves into Employers of Choice (EOC). Nevertheless, even if a firm makes a great effort, no guarantee existing and future employees will consider that company to be their employer of choice. However, a small portion of job seekers consider the status or brand of the employer while deciding to choose or associate with an employer [ 26 ].

There are various attributes regarding EOCs where employees play a critical role in designating an employer as an EOC. Some of these include competitive pay and benefits, the provision of a reasonable degree of security, quality of work life, enhanced future employability, commitment, employer image, supportive leadership, participation of employees, psychological benefits, opportunities for growth, and learning and recognition [ 2 , 27 , 28 , 31 , 32 , 46 ] [ 52 , 70 ]. An EOC provides an incredible work atmosphere, culture, climate, and workplace environment to attract and retain a highly competent workforce. The characteristics of an EOC may aid both the workforce and customers in terms of holistic well-being. Large numbers of progressive organizations have set themselves the goal of becoming an EOC, where people are willing to work at any cost, not only for financial benefits but also for psychological and functional benefits. Thus, the assessment of an employer as an EOC involves working with an exceptional employer who recognizes the achievements of employees in the workplace. Noe [ 33 ] proposed that an employer can be successful through a rigorous evaluation process of determining the leadership qualities, best practices, and culture that would be assets to attract and manage the most talented employees in achieving their goals.

Theoretically, due to a lack or absence of a strong theoretical foundation in EOC research, mainly social theory, this research adopts Social Exchange Theory (SET) for several reasons. First, SET is one of the most influential theories in business and HR mainly found useful in explaining the relationship between employees and employers which is based on reciprocity conveying benefited resources [ 15 , 16 , 38 ]. The approach has the distinct advantage of recognizing employees’ interpersonal and social issues. Second, SET is relational to the context and aim of the present research. Third, this current research is a qualitative study driven by social theory that has been adapted in advance of the data collection. The role of theory is fundamental as a vehicle in the present research. However, qualitative scholars often use theory as something that emerges from the data collection and analysis [ 12 ]. Fourth, the theoretical lens of SET assists in serving the main aim of this research by offering a clearer explanation and better understanding to identify and investigate this new phenomenon, EOC, and factors that designate their EOC. SET sees the factors that contribute to EOC as resources. In general, the relationship between reciprocity and resources in SET is interdependent. Employers need to provide employees with resources that will oblige them to reciprocate in kind with engagement [ 38 ]. In other words, there is no reciprocity without resources. Ultimately, reciprocity within EOC contains and conveys resources. Employees will choose to produce in response to the resources they receive from their employer of choice [ 38 ]. According to Cropanzano and Mitchell [ 15 ], once employees receive socioemotional and economic resources from their employer, they, in return, feel obliged to respond in kind and repay the employer. Therefore, the resources/factors of SET assist in investigating the types of resources that employees expect to receive from employers.

Methodologically speaking, most existing business and HRM studies about EOC in relation to marketing only use wither single quantitative method which indicates there is a qualitative methodological gap, particularly triangulation methods in HR studies. Within the context of the current research, a qualitative approach is not only appropriate but also needed. The two qualitative methods help to uncover unknown antecedents that contribute to designating the employer as an Employer of Choice in a new and undiscovered context, Saudi Arabia organization. Based on the evaluation of relevant empirical studies, the researcher realizes that the approach drawn from the research questions and the overall strategy of the research required a need for qualitative triangulation research methods, compared to a quantitative method. The advantage of qualitative research is that it allows the researcher to gain a greater perspective into the insights of the participant because it provides the opportunity for the power of words to prevail. An example is a semi-structured interview. Instead of tick boxes and Likert scales (quantitative research), qualitative research asks for self-expression and an interpretation of how the subject feels and understands. A qualitative approach seeks answers to questions that stress what and how social experience is created and given meaning. In contrast, quantitative studies emphasize the measurement and analysis of causal relationships between variables, not processes.

The two triangulated qualitative methods that will be used in the present study are semi-structured interviews and a document analysis approach (combined longitudinal and cross-sectional designs). The two qualitative methods are ‘equally and parallel’ which can be viewed as exact equivalents to serve the purpose of the study by addressing the research question. Most importantly, these two triangulated methods will help improve objectivity on the limitations of qualitative methodology is low objectivity. Moreover, the two qualitative sources offer rich data to answer the research questions sufficiently. In addition, using triangulation methods will minimize the common method bias.

The two approaches tend to be available for data collection in research studies: longitudinal and cross-sectional research—this research uses both. The present research, through having data from the document that provides reactions accumulative of employees’ experiences about EOC covered 2 years long, typically fits the description of longitudinal research. For example, the document analysis covers 2 years and the semi-structured interview covers 3 months. For the present research, both cross-sectional and longitudinal provide rich accounts of the employees’ accumulative experience.

Contextually, the demands and needs for EOC differ from country to country due to business, social, and cultural differences. Based on the analysis of the relevant literature about EOC in the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, it found limited empirical-based evidence studies.

Contextually, based on a review of the literature, it appears there is a lack of empirical knowledge concerning the factors that contribute to EOC designation, especially with regard to employees’ perspectives in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia. This present research seeks to address this contextual knowledge gap. This study aims to identify and investigate relevant employee-related factors. The study assumes significance since no such attempt has yet been made concerning EOCs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The objective of the study is thus to identify the factors of an employer that contribute towards making it an EOC based on Social Exchange Theory (SET).

Social exchange theory (SET) and Employer of Choice (EOC)

Some EOC studies have adopted psychological contract theory and signalling theory (e.g., [ 37 ]). Even though Saini and Jawahar’s [ 37 ] study focused heavily on the managerial and psychological aspects, these theories did not consider social and employee perspectives.

This research adopts Social Exchange Theory (SET) as a theoretical lens mainly because it magnifies the importance of reciprocity, or two-way processes [ 15 , 16 , 38 ]. There are several reasons for the value of the social theoretical foundation in the present research. First, SET is one of the most significant conceptual approaches in human resources management and organisational behavior and is based on reciprocity between employees and employers in the workplace [ 15 , 16 , 38 ]. Second, SET is also useful in explaining the core conceptualization of the present research—the notion of the employer of choice. In theory, SET recognizes employees as a party that is reciprocally interdependent with employers. The SET mainly determines the relationship between parties involved, i.e., employer and employee, who always maintain a reciprocal interconnected affiliation. Third, and most importantly, SET’s resources are considered as factors that employees need or expect in order to reciprocate and designate an employer as an Employer of Choice. Fourth, Blau [ 6 ] suggests that social exchanges are voluntary actions that, in the context of the present research, align with the word “choice”. For example, in the context of the present study, if the employer provides resources to employees, in return, employees are expected to reciprocate that by choosing the employer.

Unlike psychological contract theory and signaling theory [ 37 ], SET is a social science theory that considers non-psychological or economic resources in social relationships based on voluntary interactions, not economic transactions. This viewpoint is aligned with other social exchange theorists who suggest, in comparison to economic exchange, that relationships depend on willful actions in contrast to formal actions [ 3 , 6 ]. Relationships based upon social exchange generally have more intangible resources and focus more on resources related to socio-emotional factors, e.g., cognizance, appreciation, or praise [ 36 ]. These intangible resources of SET offer a clearer explanation of how employees view their relationships with employers in the workplace, based on reciprocation and more than mere economic resources.

The present research is driven by SET to explore and identify employee-related factors/resources that designate an employer as an EOC. The role of theory is fundamental as a vehicle in the present research. However, qualitative scholars often use theory as it allows factors to emerge from the data analysis [ 12 ]. Conversely, Silverman [ 43 ] argued that most contemporary qualitative scholars have become increasingly interested in testing and exploring theories. Undoubtedly, there is no reason to prevent the use of qualitative triangulation research in the testing of theories that have been specified in advance of collecting the data [ 12 ]. Further, SET is an ideal theory that could assist in meeting the main aim of the present research of identifying and investigating the factors that make employees choose their employer. SET stipulates that the relationship between reciprocity and resources is interdependent. Employers need to provide employees with resources that will oblige them to reciprocate in kind with engagement [ 38 ]. In other words, there is no reciprocity without resources. Ultimately, reciprocity contains and conveys resources. Therefore, a certain amount of various resources is essential for the existence of an EOC. Employees will choose to engage themselves in response to the resources they receive from their employer [ 38 ]. According to Cropanzano and Mitchell [ 15 ], once employees receive resources associated with their socio-emotional and economic needs from their employer, they, in return, feel indebted and reciprocate with the employer in multiple ways. Therefore, the resources/factors identified in SET assist in investigating the types of resources that employees expect to receive from employers. The ongoing empirical examinations in organizational behavior and development were also taken into consideration to ascertain a fair idea of the concept of EOC and its related factors.

Relevant EOC empirical work

EOC can be best understood through employer branding, supportive leadership, fairness in recruitment processes, opportunities for growth and development, and retaining and attracting talented employees. Chhabra and Mishra [ 13 ] asserted that employer branding reflects the employer’s image and employer-of-choice status, and suggested that the best methods, tools, and techniques must be applied by the employer to motivate, influence, retain, and engage employees. Vinoth and Vasantha [ 46 ] conducted a study using a sample of 364 final-year students to examine the utility of employer branding in choosing an employer. They found that psychological benefits offered by a company are more important than other benefits such as financial or economic and functional benefits when choosing the right employer. Jobseekers are likely to be attracted to those firms that exhibit unlimited employer image value in contrast to those who show a low degree of employer value related to the image. However, other factors have not yet been identified, particularly in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), an issue that the present study seeks to address.

Saini and Jawahar [ 37 ] studied the influence of employment experience and employer rankings on employee recommendation as an EOC. They also probed whether these variables have an impact on employee characteristics. The study was conducted on 39,010 employees, which took 3-year employer rankings (2015–2017) and revealed that employee recommendations are influenced by employees’ experience in the workplace. Further, they (ibid.) observed that employee characteristics such as full-time vs. part-time, tenure, employment status, and employment experience also influenced employee recommendations pertaining to the company as an employer of choice. However, unlike the present research, Saini and Jawahar [ 37 ] focused mostly on managerial perspectives.

In addition, Mau [ 27 ] conducted a recent study focusing on determining the notion of branding the public sector as EOC to recruit and retain the leadership ability of people in the service. This study was undertaken to address a challenge encountered by the government in the recruitment of candidates with optimal capabilities for public services. The Canadian Federal Government undertook an initiative in 2007 to brand their public service. The findings suggested that it was very challenging to provide an exact concept of branding for the public sector, where a diversified workforce was employed [ 27 ]. Although branding was found to be one of the most popular concepts in the public sector as an EOC, it was found that these concepts had flipsides that required immediate attention. Though the Canadian Federal Government took great pains to develop the concept of branding in the public service, they failed to lead federal public services to be considered as an EOC.

Recently, Tanwar and Kumar [ 45 ] conducted a study of college students to ascertain the association between brand dimensions of employers and EOC status. Factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used in the study. Tanwar and Kumar [ 45 ] found that person-organisation fit was perceived as a mediator for EOC and that the dimension related to employer brand required a link with person-organisation fit. It was also determined that social media plays a key moderating role in facilitating EOC. Unlike Tanwar and Kumar’s [ 45 ] research, the present study adopts qualitative and longitudinal methods that offer in-depth understanding in different ways based on employees’ experiences. Most importantly, unlike the present research, the pieces of research discussed appear are not based on theoretical foundations, which means they can be considered more as practical research rather than scholarly/academic work.

Based on the critical evaluation of the relevant literature, most works have been focused on managerial and organisational perspectives and have neglected employees’ perspectives. This research, grounded in employees’ experiences, addresses this significant gap in the literature. Unlike other managerial and organizational studies, this research, through the theoretical lens of Social Exchange Theory, identifies and explores employee-related factors that attract employees and encourage them to designate an employer as an Employer of Choice. Based on these points, the following exploratory research question was developed.

What factors attract employees to reciprocate their designation of an employer as an Employer of Choice (EOC)?

Qualitative triangulation methodology

The primary notion of qualitative research is to develop an understanding of a point rather than to verify it. Due to this, the outcomes of a qualitative investigation can be considered to be novel, reliable, genuine, and trustworthy, in contrast to quantitative research [ 19 , 25 ]. However, in qualitative methodology, subjectivity is a matter of concern [ 11 ].

With quantitative research, the findings have a higher validity as a result of the high degree of representation [ 51 ]—a concern for qualitative research. However, this research uses two triangulation methods, which provide rich data and a consequent increase in validity. For example, in the present study, document analysis, along with the open interviews, are utilized equally to shore up validity.

There is a qualitative methodological gap in the relevant literature about Employer of Choice (EOC). Reflecting on the research question above that emerged from these knowledge gaps, the answers to the research question could be obtained through both qualitative and/or quantitative methods. However, as mentioned in the review section, from the analysis of the relevant studies (e.g. [ 37 ]), it appears that a quantitative approach is favored. Therefore, this research addresses this methodological gap by using a qualitative approach. Within the context of the current research, a qualitative approach is not only appropriate but also needed.

To approach the research question, a mixed triangulation of the qualitative approach to uncover unknown factors that encourage employees to designate an employer as an Employer of Choice (EOC). The two triangulated qualitative methods used in the present study are open interviews and document analyses. The two qualitative methods are applied “equally and in parallel” and can be viewed as exact equivalents to serve the purpose of the study by addressing the research questions. To the researcher’s knowledge, this is the first study of EOC that adopts qualitative triangulation methods—in particular interviews and documentary analysis. The obtained document method is a complete set that draws upon first-hand employee comments spanning a 4-year period which is extracted from the internal organizations’ HR Blog system. The total number of comments is 104.

The second method is open interviews conducted with 22 employees. Triangulation methods assist in capturing different dimensions of the same phenomenon. For example, interviews and document analysis support the interrogation of the data to identify and/or explain factors, problems, or causes that affect employees’ decisions to choose an employer. Thus, the need to use triangulation of multiple data sources is crucial not only because it offers richer data, but also because it allows digging in-depth to obtain fine-grained results that capture what is happening in reality.

In general, triangulation is used as a means of cross-examining results from one form of data collection with those of another. For example, the document analyzed in this research contains 104 employee comments over 4 years, and interviews covering 3 months. For this research, the data triangulation helps create greater confidence in the overall results [ 53 ]. The two triangulated qualitative methods decrease researcher bias [ 56 ]. Multiple qualitative methods are employed in the collecting of data as a means of minimizing bias and limitations inherent in each method ([ 56 ]. For example, unlike with open interviews, the document analysis method used in the current research contains 104 comments written first-hand by employees with no involvement from the researcher, which decreases bias.

Two broad approaches are available for data collection in research studies: longitudinal and cross-sectional research. This research draws on both approaches. Because the data from the document provides cumulative employee reactions and employee perceptions over 4 years, this study most typically fits the description of longitudinal research.

The obtained document from the employer was as a complete set which was extracted from the internal HR Blog platform of a large multinational energy corporation. The obtained document contained interactions and discussions between employees about the Employer of Choice subject. This document contains first-hand, unadulterated comments made by employees on the platform. All documents were extracted from the HR Blog as it is without modifications or editing, as the organization stated. These texts, taken from the platform, are directly and purposively relevant to the aim of the present research.

In general, researchers need to analyze the significance of documents about study problems and aims [ 7 ]. The sampling characteristic for this research is a purposive sampling technique which is widespread in qualitative research. As this research aims to identify and investigate the factors that constitute/designate an employer as an Employer of Choice (EOC), purposive sampling was used for this study to only focus on full-time employees. For example, in interviews, the purposive sampling technique was used to focus on full-time employees. For the second method, document analysis, the received document contains employees' computerized first hand-typed written where employees responded to a question about “What designated employer of choice?” This topic document was rich and detailed information about employees’ cumulative experiences over 4 years.

For interviews, respondents were enrolled via an email sent by HR inviting them to participate. The email was purposefully sent to all employees working full-time in the organization to increase the chance of diversification of participants’ demographic characteristics. The email contains a brief invitation paragraph and several attachments, namely: a plain language statement (including the author’s contact details), and the interview guide. The researcher was copied in the email and at the end of the email, the HR asked prospective participants to contact the author directly for any questions about the research and, most importantly, to arrange the interview time and location, if they have an interest. The reason behind sending these information sheets all together in advance is to give employees time to read and understand and provide them with a clear idea about the project and interview, as well as give them time to read and decide if they would like to participate. In addition, the researcher also provided each participant with a hard copy of these sheets to explain it to them before starting the interviews.

The organization which the data was collected from is a large multinational energy Saudi corporation located in Saudi Arabia. The participants are full-time employees and the demographic characteristics are high (please see Table  1 ).

Three reasons for settling on only 22 interviews. First, from interview number fifteen and onwards, most of the interviewees’ answers started becoming repetitive. Second, the confirmation and validation between the two methods reached a satisfactory level. For example, as interviews and documents were used equally weighted and parallel, some factors that emerged from the preliminary analysis of the document required further questioning, clarification, or confirmation from interviewees during interviews (and vice versa). Third, the diversity of demographic characteristics of participants was high in genders, types of jobs (technical and administrative), years of experience, nationalities, levels of education background, and position levels (please see Table  1 ).

For the present research, thematic analysis was undertaken for both methods because it offers some flexibility when analyzing qualitative data. Thematic analysis should be seen as a foundational method for qualitative analysis [ 10 ]. Qualitative thematic analysis is a commonly used approach to analyze textual material obtained from a range of sources, including interviews and documents. As defined by Braun and Clarke [ 10 ] “ thematic analysis is a method for identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns (themes) within data” (p.6) . However, for thematic analysis, there is no fixed universal method. While key themes/factors have already been identified as concepts from the analysis of literature, other themes are allowed to emerge and they are coded based on the theoretical lens of SET.

For the present research, the process of analyzing the qualitative data involved: preparation of data; familiarisation with data; generating initial codes; collating similar codes into pre-existing or emerging themes; re-reading and reviewing themes that related to the research questions; and refining themes. This process was done through creative engagement with the data and following intuition [ 10 ].

For the present research, the coding process was carried out manually. Unlike other electronic software, Wicks [ 71 ] suggests that manual coding provides the researcher with an opportunity to reflect on the analysis as they immerse themselves in the data. However, one of the disadvantages of using manual coding, in particular with large data sets, is that it is less efficient or manageable [ 40 ]. As a result, this may lead to missing important aspects of the data. However, for the present research, the author has spent a large amount of effort and time to organize, read, and understand the data ensuring there are no missing key information or relevant factors.

Manually, the analysis of interviews’ transcriptions and documents was completed through the use of thematic analysis by starting with coding key factors that were identified based on the frequencies (presented in the conceptual model). Through the identified themes, the data will be allowed to capture an explanation of possible reality through evidence, which ultimately helps address the research questions sufficiently, as suggested by Braun and Clarke [ 10 ]. In the second stage of coding, there were new factors started to emerge based on the data analysis of pre-determined factors. These new emergent factors were coded based on the frequency and relevance of patterns. Through the coding process of thematic analysis, the entire data set is used to explore meaningful, frequent, and relevant patterns that emerge [ 54 ].

The use of two different sources of qualitative data has significantly reduced any potential risks of common method variance (CMV) [ 8 ]. This present research uses two mixed qualitative methods. Two procedural actions were taken to reduce CMV. First, the data were collected from interviews and documents at two different and separate times. Second, during the coding and thematic analysis stage, some of the key factors emerged from the interviews’ transcriptions and others were allowed to emerge from document analysis, but further confirmation and validation were conducted with other sources/methods to avoid any risks of common method variance. Therefore, the results of the investigated factors revealed that the issue of common method variance was not a major issue in this study.

The use of two mixed methods has assisted in overcoming any risks of bias, e.g., social desirability bias (SDB). First, all participants' personal information in the HR Blog where the documents were extracted from was completely anonymous which reduced social desirability bias (SDB). Second, the document analysis method used in the current research contains 104 comments written first-hand by employees with no involvement by the researcher, which consequently, decreases the bias. Third, for the interviews, in the plain language sheet, I mentioned that all of their responses would be confidential their participation is voluntary and they could leave at any time during the interview. Therefore, the use of two mixed methods has not only helped to decrease SDB and increase the genuineness of responses but also significantly increased the results’ confirmation and validation.

Most importantly, as the present research is theory-driven, the SET lens played a fundamental role in the analysis of the data. The coding techniques of thematic analysis necessarily depend on whether or not the themes are “theory-driven” (Braun and Clarke 2006). In the present research, themes have been analyzed, identified and interpreted, and driven or guided by “resources”, as provided in SET.

Findings and discussion

The purpose of this discussion section is to theoretically and empirically analyze, interpret, and establish the significance of the findings in the relevant literature, in particular about the research problem being investigated.

The overall theoretical analysis and interpretation of the present study’s results confirm that designating an employer as an Employer of Choice is based on reciprocity between employee and employer in exchanging resources. This is in line with the SET [ 15 , 38 ] which postulates that employees are involved in a social exchange relationship when they act in favor of another party, with the expectation that this favor is reciprocated in the future. Saks [ 38 ] suggested that employees are more willing to reciprocate or exchange their engagement for resources provided by their employer. Moreover, this is consistent with other studies that have suggested that EOC factors in organizations’ context in the workplace depend on reciprocal interactions [ 9 , 20 , 35 ].

Based on the thematic analysis of findings in this study, several factors were identified as significantly affecting employees’ designation of an employer as an employer of choice. The results that emerged from the analysis are summarised in Table  2 below.

Each of the above factors (present in the table), as identified by the respondents is now discussed in detail.

Company image

It is evident from the table that company image and reputation were of great importance and were ranked first. The vast majority of employees believe that the company image is a fundamental factor for EOC. It can be considered an extremely important factor that could lead to an organization being designated an EOC. Company image can be understood in terms of employees’ desire to continue in the company for a longer period of time or as long as they can. This result substantiates earlier findings mentioned in the literature review (e.g., [ 4 , 18 , 21 , 45 ]).

In contrast to a positive image, a negative image might also lead to negative perceptions of the company’s image [ 21 , 44 ]. However, Lievens and Slaughter [ 24 ] reviewed various articles and pointed out both the positive and negative aspects of company image and emphasized that a positive image of a company influences behavior towards productivity. Applying SET, it can be inferred that employees are attracted to an employer not merely for economic benefits but also for a host of non-economic benefits. Therefore, based on the analysis, company image is a socioemotional factor that was found to contribute strongly towards EOC in this study.

The results about the significance of company image and reputation to designate EOC is broadly consistent with many studies (e.g., [ 55 , 60 , 64 ]. Vast majority of participants believe that the employer’s image and reputation in public through the quality of the products’ brand and services influence the public and, consequently, make employees feel proud of their employer.

Opportunities for training and development

The analysis of the results shows training and development is one of the most important factors that they need and ultimately influence their decision to designate EOC. Employees interested in acquiring new skills through training. In return, employers need to consider this to become EOC. In light of the relevant literature, this result is also in agreement few studies (e.g., [ 61 , 65 ]. However, these studies did not fully focus on EOC as a concept but focused on organizational performance. For example, Salah [ 39 ] suggests that training and development have an impact that leads to an increase in productivity, quality, and performance. These findings were also supported by Karim et al. [ 63 ]. Theoretically, Cropanzano et al. [ 16 ] and Cropanzano and Mitchell [ 15 ] suggest that the employer–employee relationship can be established through reciprocities. Unlike other studies, this study has thus identified an opportunity for drawing on training and development as a significant factor that is capable of contributing toward perceptions of an EOC.

Company’s ability to attract and retain employees

Being able to attract talents in the market and most importantly retain them is found one of the most critical factors for employees to designate any employer as an EOC. More specific to the context of the organization as an employer, organizational attractiveness refers to the extent to which potential employees view an organization as a desirable and positive place to work [ 57 , 69 ].

From the table, it can be observed that attracting and retaining talent is one of the vital components of EOC. This indicates that one of the important employer functions is to attract and retain fresh talent with appropriate competencies to achieve organizational success. Participants believe that the talents that the organization attracts will positively influence them. This factor supports other studies that have been highlighted by many researchers [ 24 , 48 , 52 , 68 ].

Satisfaction, involvement, and commitment

One of the key factors found influencing the designation of EOC is employees’ satisfaction, involvement in decision-making, and organizational commitment. Employees believe that these can be achieved via satisfactory compensation and benefits, other amenities, paid holidays, participation in decision-making and job security are factors that could facilitate perception as an EOC. One of the key attributes of SET is that relationships progress over some time with the help of mutual commitment and satisfaction [ 6 , 15 , 17 , 22 , 29 , 38 ]. The findings from this study in this respect align with several earlier studies which suggest that job satisfaction, commitment, and involvement play a key role in making employees feel loyal to the employer [ 4 , 57 ].

The other significant factor was found to be of importance to employees in developing a positive attitude towards an EOC. Employees perceive that fairness exists in organizations if there are vertical promotions, proper resource allocations, equity, equal treatment, and justice. The current findings from this study are in alignment with previous research by Baldwin [ 5 ] and Polayni and Tompa [ 66 ]. Molm [ 30 ] suggests that fairness is one of the attributes that helps in establishing a good rapport between the employer and employees. Fairness is also found to mitigate conflicts and would be helpful in an employer becoming an EOC. This finding also has its moorings in SET. Treating employees fairly in the workplace mainly in promotion and incentives significantly affects employees’ decision to designate any employer as an EOC.

Work culture and environment

Considerable evidence exists to support the claim that HR practice and supportive behaviors in the company could create a positive work culture and an outstanding work environment in which employees are interested in working with and continuing to work with the employer. According to SET, employee engagement depends on the nature of the environment and culture provided by the employer to their employees [ 38 ]. This is also in line with the findings of Allam [ 49 ], according to whom HRM practices help in establishing good working atmospheres or an appropriate culture so that employees consider continuing with the employer.

The analysis of the findings suggests that organizational culture plays a significant role in making an employer an EOC. Outside of EOC’s context, this result is broadly in agreement with several studies (e.g., [ 62 ]). It seems that organizational culture is not a minor issue for employees. The analysis and interpretation of the data confirm that the organization's culture becomes a pivotal factor for employees to designate any employer as an EOC.

Employers provide appropriate rewards to their employees in return for their commendable performance, which encourages employees to perform further. Rewards refers to offering incentives to employees. Looking at it from the perspective of the SET, as recognized in the literature and the conceptual model, rewards are socioemotional and economic resources that employees may expect to receive from employers. This reciprocity and pattern of exchange is also highlighted in SET [ 6 , 13 , 23 , 41 ]. The findings about rewards are supported by the work of Kucherov and Zavyalova [ 65 ] and Clark and Oswald [ 14 ], who explained that rewards lead to better performances, which could, in turn, lead to the organization being considered an EOC. However, unlike Kucherov and Zavyalova [ 65 ] and other managerialists who associate rewards with job performance, the present research focuses on this as a repayment resource for employees to designate an employer as EOC.

Opportunities for growth, teamwork, and motivation

Career development and growth are found one of the factors that heavily influence the designation of EOC for employees. In the documents, employees pointed out that, at their present company, career prospects are good, employees are part of the growing company worldwide, there is good team conduct, and employees feel motivated when their performance is valued. SET stipulates that decisions made by individuals would be based on expectation of certain outcomes. The factors generated in this study are in alignment with this aspect of SET and alignment with the findings of Cropanzano and Mitchell [ 15 ].

Concern for society

It was found that employees valued their organization’s concern for society. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives aimed at uplifting society have been considered part of leading an employer to be evaluated as an EOC. The interpretation of this finding shows that not just society is affected by CSR, but also employees. It was surprising that employees take the CSR factor to designate an employer's EOC. This found to be significant This finding is consistent with several studies (e.g., [ 34 ]). According to Norbit et al. [ 34 ], employees tend to have a positive attitude towards the companies that are involved in CSR as it enhances the reputation of the organization among stakeholders. Theoretically speaking, CSR is seen as one of the resources that employees expect from employers to make, in return, an employer as EOC.

Based on analysis and interpretations of the findings, through the theoretical lens of Social Exchange Theory, the below figure (Fig.  1 ) proposes a complex theoretical/conceptual model about the antecedents/factors that encourage employees to designate an employer as an EOC.

Conceptual model (created by the author)

Research contributions and limitations

The analysis of findings from the document analysis and interviews has revealed several factors relating to and a deeper understanding of EOC. These findings contribute to theoretical knowledge, particularly SET, and empirical knowledge, specifically with respect to Saudi Arabia. Company image, opportunity for training and development, attracting and retaining, satisfaction, involvement and commitment, fairness, work culture and environment, reward, opportunities for growth, teamwork and motivation, and concern for society emerged as the most important components of EOC in this study. Many of the researchers who have studied SET have observed that the employee–employer relationship depends on exchange, reciprocity, and a relationship that satisfies both parties. It can be considered that an EOC is also dependent on relationships and reciprocity. In the event of this association having longevity, it would be beneficial to both parties and employees would then consider the organization as an EOC.

Many employers implement practices to attract and retain talented employees. EOC involves the inculcation of holistic satisfaction, having a conducive to encouraging work culture and environment, and the overall well-being of employees. Though the majority of employees in this study held a favorable opinion about EOCs, a few lamented the lack of well-being, motivation, promotion criteria, and rigid HR practices. They considered these factors to force employees to change jobs. Management needs to consider such “flipsides” of the organization to retain talent. Researchers argue that reciprocities lead to minimization of employee turnover, maximization of commitment, satisfaction, overcoming of role stress, and creating a pleasing image of the employer in the market [ 28 , 42 ].

The present study is not devoid of limitations. The first limitation of the present research relates to the external factors that might affect employees’ designation of an employer as EOC, such as cultural issues. Hence, it might be argued that the results may be unique to the Saudi context, or may not be applicable to other cultures and countries. Cultural issues can be linked to organizational culture or outside culture, depending on the country and background. For example, future studies may consider investigating the impact of employees’ cultural backgrounds on EOC. There is much room for further progress in determining how cultural factors affect EOC. As a result, further work is required to uncover new knowledge in this area.

The second limitation related to the use of a purposive sampling method to gather the information from the participants, which may influence the generalisability of the findings. However, there are multiple avenues for future research. Standardized tools and mechanisms of data analysis with different variables can be used in future research to acquire further knowledge that will spark new information assimilation about the concept of EOC in more than one organization or Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

The third limitation of the present research is that the empirical result cannot be generalized because it used a single case study based on one single organization. However, the theoretical results of SET can be generalized mainly because it recognises employees who are in reciprocal interdependent relations with the employer. The results can be different from organization to organization depending on several factors, such as the type of the industry, and the size of the company.

Availability of data

Data are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Ambler T, Barrow S. The employer brand. J Brand Manage. 1996;4(3):185–206.

Article   Google Scholar  

Armstrong M. Performance management. 3rd ed. London: Kogan Page; 2006.

Google Scholar  

Aryee S, Budhwar PS, Chen ZX. Trust as a mediator of the relationship between organisational justice and work outcomes: test of a social exchange model. J Organ Behav. 2002;23:267–86.

Backhaus K, Tikoo S. Conceptualizing and researching employer branding. Career Dev Int. 2004;9(5):501–17.

Baldwin S. Organisational justice. Brighton: Institute for Employment Studies; 2006.

Blau PM. Exchange and power in social life. New York: Wiley; 1964.

Bowen GA. Document analysis as a qualitative research method. Qual Res J. 2009;9(2):27–40. https://doi.org/10.3316/QRJ0902027 .

Bozionelos N, Simmering MJ. Methodological threat or myth? Evaluating the current state of evidence on common method variance in human resource management research. Hum Resour Manag J. 2022;32(1):194–215.

Branham L. Planning to become an employer of choice. J Organ Excell. 2005;24(3):57–68.

Braun V, Clarke V. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qual Res Psychol. 2006;3(2):77–101.

Bryman A, Bell E. Business research methods. USA: Oxford University Press; 2007.

Bryman A. Social research methods. USA: Oxford University Press; 2015.

Chiaburu D, Harrison DA. Do peers make the place? Conceptual synthesis and meta-analysis of lateral social influences on perceptions, attitudes, OCBs, and performance. J Appl Psychol. 2008;93:1082–103.

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Clark AE, Oswald AJ. A simple statistical method for measuring how life events affect happiness. Int J Epidemiol. 2002;31:1139–44.

Cropanzano R, Mitchell MS. Social exchange theory: an interdisciplinary review. J Manag. 2005;31:874–900.

Cropanzano R, Anthony E, Daniels S, Hall A. Social exchange theory: a critical review with theoretical remedies. Acad Manag Ann. 2017;11:479–516.

Farrell D, Rusbult CE. Exchange variables as predictors of job satisfaction, job commitment, and turnover: the impact of rewards, costs, alternatives, and investments. Organ Behav Human Perform. 1981;28(1):78–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(81)90016-7 .

Gatewood RD, Gowan MA, Lautenschlager GJ. Corporate image, recruitment image, and initial job choice decisions. Acad Manag J. 1993;36:414–27.

Guba EG, Lincoln YS. Competing paradigms in qualitative research. Handb Qual Res. 1994;2:105.

Herman RE, Gioia JL. Helping your organization become an employer of choice. Employ Relat Today. 2001;28(2):63.

Highhouse S, Brooks ME, Greguras G. An organisational impression management perspective on the formation of corporate reputations. J Manage. 2009;35(6):1481–93.

Kelley HH. Interpersonal accommodation. Am Psychol. 1968;23:399–410.

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Lee F, Edmondson AC, Thomke S, Worline M. The mixed effects of inconsistency in organizations. Organ Sci. 2004;15:310–26.

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Lievens F, Slaughter J. Employer image and employer branding: what we know and what we need to know. Annu Rev Organ Psychol Organ Behav. 2016;3:4.1-4.34.

Lincoln YS, Guba EG. Naturalistic inquiry. USA: Sage; 1985.

Book   Google Scholar  

Macleod C. Workplace barometer, employer of choice: a reality cheque. p4. 2007. Available from www.workplacebarometer.com.au .

Mau T. “Enhancing leadership capacity in the public sector: branding as an employer of choice. Int J Public Leadership. 2019;15(3):155–69. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPL-05-2019-0019 .

Miles SJ, Mangold G. A conceptualization of the employee branding process. J Relationship Market. 2004;3(2–3):65–87.

Molm LD. Dependence and risk: transforming the structure of social exchange. Soc Psychol Quart. 1994;57:163–76.

Molm LD. The social exchange framework. In: Burke P, editor. Contemporary social psychological theories. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press; 2006. p. 24–44.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Moriatry J. Participation in the workplace: are employees special. J Bus Ethics. 2010;29:373–84.

Mosley RW. Customer experience, organisational culture and the employer brand. J Brand Manage. 2007;15(2):123–32.

Noe RA. Employee training and development. 5th ed. USA: Mc Graw Hill; 2010.

Norbit N, Nawawi A, Salin ASAP. Corporate social responsibility practices among the SMEs in Malaysia—a preliminary analysis. Manage Account Rev. 2017;16(2):17–40.

Rampl LV. How to become an employer of choice: transforming employer brand associations into employer first-choice brands. J Mark Manage. 2014;30(13–14):1486–504.

Rupp DE, Cropanzano R. The mediating effects of social exchange relationships in predicting workplace outcomes from multifoci organisational justice. Organ Behav Human Decis Process. 2002;89:925–46.

Saini G, Jawahar I. The influence of employer rankings, employment experience, and employee characteristics on employer branding as an employer of choice. Career Dev Int. 2019;24(7):636–57. https://doi.org/10.1108/CDI-11-2018-0290 .

Saks A. Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. J Manage Psychol. 2006;21(7):600–19.

Salah MRA. The impact of training and development on employees performance and productivity. Int J Manage Sci Bus Res. 2016;5(7):36–70.

Saldana J. The coding manual for qualitative researchers. USA: Sage; 2015.

Schneider B. The climate for service: an application of the climate construct. In: Schneider B, editor. Organisational climate and culture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; 1990. p. 383–412.

Sharma R, Jain V, Singh SP. The impact of employer branding on organisational commitment in Indian IT Sector. IOSR J Bus Manage. 2018;20(1):49–54.

Silverman D. Interpreting qualitative data. USA: Sage; 2015.

Sutton RI, Callahan AI. The stigma of bankruptcy: spoiled organisational image and its management. Acad Manage J. 1987;30:405–36.

Tanwar K, Kumar A. Employer brand, person-organisation fit and employer of choice. Personnel Rev. 2019;48(3):799–823. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-10-2017-0299 .

Vinoth K, Vasantha S. The influence of employer brand in deciding the workplace, perception of prospective employees. Int J Sci Eng Res. 2014;5(10):1401–10.

Ahmad A, Khan MN, Haque MA. Employer branding aids in enhancing employee attraction and retention. J Asia Pacific Bus. 2020;21(1):27–38.

Albinger HS, Freeman SJ. Corporate social performance and attractiveness as an employer to different job seeking populations. J Bus Ethics. 2000;28:243–53.

Allam Z. Exploring ambient discriminatory HRM practices: An insight from Kingdom Telecom Company. J Soc Sci Res. 2019;5(3):646–54.

Baker T. Attracting and retaining talent: becoming an employer of choice. Springer; 2014.

Berg B (2007) Qualitative research methods for the social sciences. pp. 148–157

Berthon P, Ewing M, Hah LL. Captivating company: dimensions of attractiveness in employer branding. Int J Advertising. 2005;24(2):151–72.

Bogdan R, Biklen SK. Qualitative research for education. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon; 1997.

Boyatzis RE. Transforming qualitative information: Thematic analysis and code development. Sage; 1998.

Cable DM, Turban DB. Establishing the dimensions, sources and value of job seekers' employer knowledge during recruitment. In: Research in personnel and human resources management. Emerald Group Publishing Limited; 2001. pp. 115-163

Denzin NK. Triangulation: A case for methodological evaluation and combination. Soc Methods 1978;339–357.

Ehrhart KH, Ziegert JC. Why are individuals attracted to organizations? J Manage. 2005;31(6):901–19.

Francis D, Bessant J. Targeting innovation and implications for capability development. Technovation. 2005;25(3):171–83.

Hult GTM. Toward a theory of the boundary-spanning marketing organization and insights from 31 organization theories. J Acad Market Sci 39(4), 509–536. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-011-0253-6

Hetrick S, Martin G (2006) Corporate reputations, branding and people management. Routledge.

Jain N, Bhatt P. Employment preferences of job applicants: unfolding employer branding determinants. J Manage Dev. 2015;34(6):634–52.

Judge TA, Bono JE, Locke EA. Personality and job satisfaction: the mediating role of job characteristics. J Appl Psychol. 2000;85(2):237.

Karim MM, Choudhury MM, Latif WB. The impact of training and development on employees’ performance: An analysis of quantitative data. Noble Int J Bus Manage Res. 2019;3(2):25–33.

Knox S, Freeman C. Measuring and managing employer brand image in the service industry. J Market Manage. 2006;22(7–8):695–716.

Kucherov D, Zavyalova E. HRD practices and talent management in the companies with the employer brand. Euro J Train Dev. 2012;36(1):86–104.

Polanyi M, Tompa E. Rethinking work-health models for the new global economy: A qualitative analysis of emerging dimensions of work. Work. 2004;23(1):3–18.

PubMed   Google Scholar  

Price C, Turnbull D (2007) The organizational challenges of global trends: A McKinsey global survey, McKinsey Quarterly

Robertson SJ (2011) The merit of intensive leadership development programs on building-level administrators' sustainability. The University of Southern Mississippi.

Rynes SL, Bretz RD Jr, Gerhart B. The importance of recruitment in job choice: A different way of looking. Pers Psychol. 1991;44(3):487–521.

Sokro E. Impact of employer branding on employee attraction and retention. Euro J Bus Manage. 2012;4(18):164–73.

Wicks D. The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Qual Res Organ Manage Int J. 2017;12:169–70.

Download references

Acknowledgements

The author extends their appreciation to King Khalid University.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Human Resources Management Department, College of Business, King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi Arabia

Mohamed Mohiya

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

The author made his contributions in conceptualization, designing methodology, investigation, supervision, visualization, writing the original draft, analyzing the data, and project administration.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mohamed Mohiya .

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate.

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

Not applicable. Authors' contributions  

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Mohiya, M. What constitutes an employer of choice? A qualitative triangulation investigation. Hum Resour Health 22 , 41 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-024-00928-7

Download citation

Received : 12 October 2023

Accepted : 07 June 2024

Published : 18 June 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-024-00928-7

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Employer of choice
• Social exchange theory
• Thematic analysis
• Triangulation
• Saudi Arabia
• Qualitative

Human Resources for Health

ISSN: 1478-4491

• Submission enquiries: Access here and click Contact Us
• General enquiries: [email protected]

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

Six Components of a Great Corporate Culture

• John Coleman

From a vision to your people, the foundation for shaping — or changing — your organization.

The benefits of a strong corporate culture are both intuitive and supported by social science. According to James L. Heskett , culture “can account for 20-30% of the differential in corporate performance when compared with ‘culturally unremarkable’ competitors.” And HBR writers have offered advice on navigating different geographic cultures , selecting jobs based on culture , changing cultures , and offering feedback across cultures , among other topics.

• JC John Coleman is the author of the HBR Guide to Crafting Your Purpose . Subscribe to his free newsletter, On Purpose , follow him on Twitter @johnwcoleman, or contact him at johnwilliamcoleman.com.

Partner Center

More From Forbes

Corporate culture: the role of leadership in customer-centricity.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

Stephen Bohanon, founder and chief strategy officer at Alkami, a leading cloud-based digital banking solutions provider.

Terms like “customer-focused” and “customer experience” have become trendy, but they are also often used as a catch-all when building or denoting corporate culture strategies. Brands stand to benefit greatly by evaluating what being truly customer-centric means in a business-to-business (B2B) technology-forward organization that is fast-paced and experiencing a growth trajectory.

While it’s easy for any company to declare itself customer-centric, the foundation for organizations stands on the leadership team’s values and direct alignment with customers to solve their business needs.

Invest in products and people.

When founding and operating a B2B technology company, my number one priority was investing in our product and people, which ultimately threads through the customer down to the end user.

Ideally, the leadership team with an organization should take a strong stance on defining the ideal customer experience from top to bottom and instruct each team on how they contribute to their success with clear communication and guidance.

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024.

To be fully customer-centric is to prioritize incessant relationship-building and empathy alongside the necessary user experience (UX). Consumer expectations, influenced by the demand created across various industries (including software and technology), need to be considered at every stage. This practice starts from the very top of an organization and cascades into the company’s culture and strategy execution—which in turn creates an environment where the company works closely with customers through advisory boards, executive visits and other feedback channels.

Recruitment is one building block.

Critical to this foundation is employee recruitment and immersion into the organization. Embed company culture and viewpoints into the interview process, in addition to making sure a candidate understands their specific role and responsibilities. The candidate should show a level of passion for how their contributions will fit into the larger picture of the company’s culture and dedication to providing an exceptional customer experience on all levels.

A simple tactic that companies can execute is to create an employee orientation team that communicates and trains new employees on each step of the customer journey. In addition to the employee’s direct supervisor, involve representatives from other departments and management levels, including key leadership and founders, who can underscore the importance of a customer-centric approach. Consistently highlighting company values by awarding merits to employees for their actions and contributions turns the intangible into affirmation and motivation.

In my own experience, this becomes practice during our quarterly new-hire orientations, where I take the time to speak personally with new joiners about our company’s history and mission in practical terms. Leading by example can also provide expectations for new hires and pave the way for open dialogue regarding performance improvement, goal setting and other key individual metrics that roll up into a customer-centric philosophy.

Maintain the pillars of customer-centricity: intent and accountability.

While leading by example can start with recruitment and onboarding, executives are in a unique position to establish a standard that extends to teams and individual contributors. Showing a willingness to get involved in day-to-day operations, such as taking a customer call or visiting them at their headquarters, can support the importance of the customer experience across all departments.

With a firm foundation in place and leaders eager to guide through examples, I've found a customer-centric culture is easily established. However, maintaining this approach throughout the company’s lifespan takes additional planning and effort. As an organization grows and inevitably strategies shift to new efforts, founders and executive leaders must always prioritize the company’s culture and values. Developing a dedicated infrastructure to continue cultivating the values it outlines from the start can bring long-term success. This encompasses the two main pillars of a customer-centric culture: intent and accountability.

Each team member must understand the company’s intent to prioritize the customer at every stage. They must also be clear on how their individual role supports that intent. Leadership should regularly evaluate team performance and individual metrics to make sure goals are aligned, extending to customer sentiment. When a customer has a deep understanding of the team’s intent, it is easier to collaborate, problem-solve and achieve success for all involved.

Challenges are also bound to arise, and demonstrating corporate accountability can go a long way to underscoring a customer-centric methodology. This is the most vital and critical piece of the puzzle. At my digital banking company, Alkami, I have seen firsthand how taking accountability promptly and in earnest can transform a potential situation into a strength. Notably, remaining customer-centric not only demonstrates your values to the customer but also to company-wide personnel.

While it’s currently in vogue to profess a customer-centric culture, this approach takes planning and execution—and dedication from leadership for sustainment within the organization. Leaders must cultivate this mentality from the beginning and consistently nurture the philosophy as the company evolves. When implemented thoroughly and genuinely, the results are felt by customers and employees in an environment designed for everyone to thrive.

Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Securing the future: Cyber security readiness report

Chapter 9: improving security culture.

There’s no doubt that implementing the right cyber security solutions is critical for addressing threats. However, many organizations also need to make changes in their company culture. Developing a stronger cyber security culture can help combat a rising number of threats while offsetting the challenges of constrained budgets, talent shortages, and conflicting priorities.

What kinds of culture changes are required? Security leaders must first enhance understanding and awareness. Employees need to understand how attacks happen. They must be educated about phishing schemes and stolen credentials as well as the web attacks, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and zero-day exploits that can bring businesses to a halt. They should be trained on how to identify attacks and how best to report them to security.

At the same time, they should understand the importance of preventing cyber attacks. They should know that successful attacks can have wide-ranging consequences — including brand reputational damage, lost customers, and significant financial losses.

In addition, employees must understand why they shouldn’t install new apps on their own or find ways to skirt security policies. Some tech-savvy employees might believe it is simpler and faster to solve seemingly minor technical challenges on their own. But by participating in shadow IT, they could be putting their organizations at serious risk. As security teams educate employees, they should make it clear that company security is a shared responsibility. Employees are often the first line of defense against threats. Empowering employees to identify and report incidents can play a key role in preventing breaches.

Successfully sharing responsibility for corporate security can ultimately alleviate some of the budget and personnel challenges facing many organizations. For example, when employees can better identify phishing attempts, they are less likely to fall for those schemes and inadvertently give away credentials that open doors for criminals. And fewer successful phishing attempts will reduce the number of breaches that security teams must address.

Enhancing awareness and understanding must extend all the way up to the executive suite and boardroom . When security leaders can educate other executives and board members about the prevalence of attacks and the tremendous harm those attacks can cause, they can garner support for security-focused programs and policies, and gain approval for larger security budgets.

Improving awareness among executives can also help produce champions — influential leaders who advocate for shifts in attitudes and behaviors across the company. Champions can inspire employees to internalize security values and adopt critical policies.

When a company has a strong security culture, CISOs can be more proactive. They can move forward with security initiatives and strengthen preparedness — without having to wait for incidents to occur.

Building a robust cyber security culture can have real, tangible cyber security benefits. In the latest Forrester research study , approximately 60% of respondents reported that improvements in corporate culture enabled their teams to respond faster to incidents in the past year. As many organizations struggle to bolster preparedness for the next attacks, enhancing awareness and understanding among employees can be one of the best investments they can make. Continue to Chapter 10: Conclusion

This article is part of a series on the latest trends and topics impacting today’s technology decision-makers.

Key takeaways

After reading this article you will be able to understand:

Survey results from over 4,000 cyber security professionals

New findings on security incidents, preparedness, and outcomes

Considerations for CISOs to secure the future and achieve better outcomes for their organization

Related resources

Chapter 8: Competing priorities in advancing preparedness

Chapter 7: Constrained budgets

Chapter 6: A talent crunch

Chapter 5: The ineffectiveness of point solutions

Chapter 4: Cyber security preparedness

Chapter 3: Securing hybrid work

Chapter 2: A rising number of cyber threats

Chapter 1: Introduction

Securing the future: Cybersecurity Readiness Survey

Receive a monthly recap of the most popular Internet insights!

Getting Started

• For enterprises
• Compare plans
• Get a recommendation
• Request a demo
• Contact sales
• Learning center
• Analyst reports
• Cloudflare Radar
• Cloudflare TV
• Case studies
• White Papers
• Developer docs
• Architecture Center
• Connectivity cloud
• SSE and SASE services
• Application services
• Network services
• Developer services
• Community hub
• Project Galileo
• Athenian Project
• Cloudflare for Campaigns
• Critical Infrastructure Defense Project
• Connect 2024
• Help center
• Cloudflare status
• Trust & safety
• About Cloudflare
• Investor relations
• Diversity, equity, & inclusion
• Network map
• Logos & press kit
• Become a partner

Information

• Author Services

Initiatives

You are accessing a machine-readable page. In order to be human-readable, please install an RSS reader.

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess .

Feature papers represent the most advanced research with significant potential for high impact in the field. A Feature Paper should be a substantial original Article that involves several techniques or approaches, provides an outlook for future research directions and describes possible research applications.

Feature papers are submitted upon individual invitation or recommendation by the scientific editors and must receive positive feedback from the reviewers.

Editor’s Choice articles are based on recommendations by the scientific editors of MDPI journals from around the world. Editors select a small number of articles recently published in the journal that they believe will be particularly interesting to readers, or important in the respective research area. The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting work published in the various research areas of the journal.

Original Submission Date Received: .

• Active Journals
• Find a Journal
• Proceedings Series
• For Authors
• For Reviewers
• For Editors
• For Librarians
• For Publishers
• For Societies
• For Conference Organizers
• Open Access Policy
• Institutional Open Access Program
• Special Issues Guidelines
• Editorial Process
• Research and Publication Ethics
• Article Processing Charges
• Testimonials
• Preprints.org
• SciProfiles
• Encyclopedia

Article Menu

• Subscribe SciFeed
• Recommended Articles
• Google Scholar
• on Google Scholar
• Table of Contents

Find support for a specific problem in the support section of our website.

Please let us know what you think of our products and services.

Visit our dedicated information section to learn more about MDPI.

JSmol Viewer

Research on the design of zhuang brocade patterns based on automatic pattern generation.

1. Introduction

2. related literature and work, 2.1. automatic pattern generation technology, 2.2. works related to the pattern color extraction algorithm, 2.3. works related to pattern extraction algorithms, 2.4. works related to pattern organization form extraction, 3. construction of the feature dataset of zhuang brocade patterns and design of the extraction algorithm, 3.1. feature dataset construction, 3.2. color feature extraction algorithm design and results.

• Step 1: input the image and the number of clusters (the number of extracted colors).

3.3. Pattern Extraction Process and Results

3.3.1. image smoothing, 3.3.2. image segmentation processing, 3.3.3. image binarization, 3.3.4. pattern extraction results, 3.4. organizational form extraction process and results, 4. analysis of the zhuang brocade pattern generation algorithm based on pattern feature elements, 4.1. pattern sample encoding, 4.1.1. color encoding, 4.1.2. pattern encoding, 4.1.3. organizational form encoding, 4.2. zhuang brocade pattern design research, 4.2.1. algorithm design and framework.

• Use the cv2.imread(img) method to read the image. At this point, the image format is BGR.
• Convert the image to grayscale using the color space conversion function cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY). Here, img is the result returned by step A, and cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY indicates the conversion from BGR format to grayscale.
• Use the grayscale image obtained from step B as the src parameter in the cv2.threshold(src, thresh, maxval, type[, dst]) function. This function performs binary thresholding on the grayscale image, returning retVal and dst for subsequent image processing. In this context, src represents the image source (i.e., the grayscale image), thresh denotes the threshold (initial value), and maxval indicates the threshold (maximum value), set to 0 and 255, respectively. The type parameter selects the method, employing a combination of cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV and cv2.THRESH_OTSU. cv2.THRESH_OTSU utilizes the least squares method to process pixel points, seeking the optimal threshold, while cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV sets the binarization color—pixels greater than the threshold are set to 0 (black), and those less than the threshold are set to maxval, i.e., 255 (white). The returned value retVal is the threshold value, and dst represents the resulting black-and-white image.
• The color group colorGroup obtained in step A is in list format, containing all color codes and corresponding RGB values in the color group. RGB values are assigned corresponding to the colors to the parts outside the mask, i.e., img[mask] = RGB. The mask specifies the areas to be preserved from replacement, taking values of 0 or 255, and RGB represents the color to be substituted.

4.2.2. Case Examples

4.3. zhuang brocade pattern style similarity evaluation, 5. conclusions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

• Huang, Y.; Pan, Y. Discovery and Extraction of Cultural Traits in Intangible Cultural Heritages Based on Kansei Engineering: Taking Zhuang Brocade Weaving Techniques as an Example. Appl. Sci. 2021 , 11 , 11403. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Nong, Z. Feature Extraction and Measurement Algorithm Based on Color in Image Database. J. Intell. Fuzzy Syst. 2020 , 38 , 3885–3891. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Tian, G.; Yuan, Q.; Hu, T.; Shi, Y. Auto-Generation System Based on Fractal Geometry for Batik Pattern Design. Appl. Sci. 2019 , 9 , 2383. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Jia, X.; Liu, Z. Element Extraction and Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification for Blue Calico. Text. Res. J. 2021 , 91 , 261–277. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Jiang, S.; Lu, Z.; Li, M. Extraction and Application of Pearl S Buck’s Cultural Elements Based on Big Data Mining. Packag. Eng. 2021 , 42 , 337–346. [ Google Scholar ]
• Liang, W. Innovative Development of Egg Carving Cultural and Creative Products Using 3D Printing Technology Based on Internet of Things. Sci. Program. 2021 , 2021 , e3267155. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Moghadam, T.S.; Afjeh, M.G.; Amirshahi, S.H. Classification of Persian Carpet Patterns Based on Quantitativeaesthetic-Relatedfeatures. Color Res. Appl. 2021 , 46 , 195–206. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Xiang, J.; Zhang, J.; Pan, R.; Han, Y.; Zhang, J.; Gao, W. Graphic Contour Extraction for Printed Fabric Based on Texture Smoothing. J. Text. Res. 2017 , 38 , 162–167. [ Google Scholar ]
• Wang, W.; Deng, N.; Xin, B.; Wang, Y.; Lu, S. Novel Segmentation Algorithm for Jacquard Patterns Based on Multi-View Image Fusion. IET Image Process. 2020 , 14 , 4563–4570. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Liu, J.; Zhuang, M.; Shang, L.; Zhang, X. Pattern Segmentation of Shadow Puppetry Costumes Based on Color Clustering. Adv. Text. Technol. 2021 , 29 , 71–77. [ Google Scholar ]
• Abdi, A.; Safabakhsh, R. An Automatic Graphic Pattern Generation Algorithm and Its Application to the Multipurpose Camouflage Pattern Design. IEEE Trans. Cybern. 2023 , 53 , 4748–4762. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ] [ PubMed ]
• Xu, S.; Zhang, Y.; Yan, S. Automatic Mandala Pattern Design and Generation Based on COOM Framework. J. Comput. Lang. 2022 , 72 , 101138. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Wu, Y.; Kyungsun, K. Automatic Generation of Traditional Patterns and Aesthetic Quality Evaluation Technology. Inf. Technol. Manag. 2022 , 25 , 125–143. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Ju, F.; Wang, Q.; Tan, Z.; Li, Q. Intelligent Recognition of Colour and Contour from Ancient Chinese Embroidery Images. Fibres Text. East. Eur. 2022 , 30 , 79–92. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Molada-Tebar, A.; Marqués-Mateu, Á.; Lerma, J.L.; Westland, S. Dominant Color Extraction with K-Means for Camera Characterization in Cultural Heritage Documentation. Remote Sens. 2020 , 12 , 520. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Jing, J.; Pinghua, X.; Xiaowan, S.; Jingwen, C.; Ruibing, L. Automatic Coloration of Pattern Based on Color Parsing of Sung Porcelain. Text. Res. J. 2022 , 92 , 5066–5079. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• He, K.; Wang, D.; Tong, M.; Zhu, Z. An Improved GrabCut on Multiscale Features. Pattern Recognit. 2020 , 103 , 107292. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Sudhakar, M.; Meena, M.J. An Efficient Interactive Segmentation Algorithm Using Color Correction for Underwater Images. Wirel. Netw. 2021 , 27 , 5435–5446. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Wang, W.; Zhuang, J.; Zhang, X.; Hsia, C.-H.; Li, C.-I.; Yang, C.-F. Household Goods Recognition Using Hierarchical Multi-Object Segmentation. Sens. Mater. 2021 , 33 , 1363. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Feng, Y.; Deng, S.; Yan, X.; Yang, X.; Wei, M.; Liu, L. Easy2Hard: Learning to Solve the Intractables From a Synthetic Dataset for Structure-Preserving Image Smoothing. IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. Learn. Syst. 2022 , 33 , 7223–7236. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ] [ PubMed ]
• Liu, J.; Zhuang, M.; Shi, L.; Gao, T. Intelligent Contour Extraction of Shadow Patterns Based on Texture Smoothing and GrabCut. J. Silk 2020 , 57 , 20–27. [ Google Scholar ]
• Castellanos, F.J.; Gallego, A.-J.; Calvo-Zaragoza, J. Unsupervised Neural Domain Adaptation for Document Image Binarization. Pattern Recognit. 2021 , 119 , 108099. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Orts, F.; Ortega, G.; Cucura, A.C.; Filatovas, E.; Garzón, E.M. Optimal Fault-Tolerant Quantum Comparators for Image Binarization. J. Supercomput. 2021 , 77 , 8433–8444. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Merzban, M.H.; Elbayoumi, M. Efficient Solution of Otsu Multilevel Image Thresholding: A Comparative Study. Expert Syst. Appl. 2019 , 116 , 299–309. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Walter, N.; Ligler, H.; Gürsoy, B. From Graphical Treatment of Combinatorics to Tiling Grammars. Nexus Netw. J. 2023 , 25 , 321–332. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Hou, Y.; Lv, J.; Liu, X.; Hu, T.; Zhao, Z. Innovative method of ethnic pattern based on neural style transfer network. J. Graph. 2020 , 41 , 606–613. [ Google Scholar ]
• Wang, W.; Lv, J.; Pan, W.; Zhao, H.; Tian, Q. Extraction and Reuse of Pattern Configuration for Handicrafts Personalized Customization. J. Graph. 2019 , 40 , 583–590. [ Google Scholar ]
• Zhu, L.; Hu, X.; Fu, C.-W.; Qin, J.; Heng, P.-A. Saliency-Aware Texture Smoothing. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 2020 , 26 , 2471–2484. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ] [ PubMed ]
• Rother, C.; Kolmogorov, V.; Blake, A. “GrabCut”: Interactive Foreground Extraction Using Iterated Graph Cuts. ACM Trans. Graph. 2004 , 23 , 309–314. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Ntirogiannis, K.; Gatos, B.; Pratikakis, I. Performance Evaluation Methodology for Historical Document Image Binarization. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 2013 , 22 , 595–609. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]

Click here to enlarge figure

Share and Cite

Ni, M.; Huang, Q.; Ni, N.; Zhao, H.; Sun, B. Research on the Design of Zhuang Brocade Patterns Based on Automatic Pattern Generation. Appl. Sci. 2024 , 14 , 5375. https://doi.org/10.3390/app14135375

Ni M, Huang Q, Ni N, Zhao H, Sun B. Research on the Design of Zhuang Brocade Patterns Based on Automatic Pattern Generation. Applied Sciences . 2024; 14(13):5375. https://doi.org/10.3390/app14135375

Ni, Minna, Qingqing Huang, Ni Ni, Huiqin Zhao, and Bo Sun. 2024. "Research on the Design of Zhuang Brocade Patterns Based on Automatic Pattern Generation" Applied Sciences 14, no. 13: 5375. https://doi.org/10.3390/app14135375

Article Metrics

Article access statistics, further information, mdpi initiatives, follow mdpi.

Subscribe to receive issue release notifications and newsletters from MDPI journals