The moderating effect of organizational culture type on the relationship between cultural satisfaction and employee referral intention: mining employee reviews on glassdoor.com

Abstract

Purpose

This paper explores how organizational culture type and cultural satisfaction are associated with employee referral intention.

Design/methodology/approach

A total of 1,789 online reviews on glassdoor.com of nine companies from the three industries were collected. Applying directed content analysis based on the competing values framework (CVF) to identify the organizational culture type that employees perceived, the authors conducted a hierarchical logistic regression analysis to test the proposed hypotheses.

Findings

Cultural satisfaction significantly increased the probability of employee referral intention. However, the moderating effect of organizational culture type on the relationship between cultural satisfaction and employee referral intention was not statistically significant.

Research limitations/implications

Direct content analysis is beneficial for capturing the dominant organizational culture type that employees perceive through online reviews created by employees. However, this method prevents this study from fully enjoying the benefits of big data even though this study collected data from a big data source.

Practical implications

The authors’ findings imply that cultural satisfaction plays a more important role in organizational outcomes than culture type itself. Thus, when managers and practitioners plan to change culture, they need to establish organizational culture aligned with organizational strategies and consider how to increase cultural satisfaction.

Originality/value

Many organizational culture studies have usually focused on exploring organizational culture type to impact organizational outcomes considering culture perception as cultural satisfaction. This study created empirical evidence of the role of cultural satisfaction in organizational outcomes such as employee referral intention by exploring the interaction effect of organizational culture type and cultural satisfaction.

Citation

Seo, J. and Lee, S. (2021), "The moderating effect of organizational culture type on the relationship between cultural satisfaction and employee referral intention: mining employee reviews on glassdoor.com", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 34 No. 5, pp. 1096-1106. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-01-2021-0009