Culture is assumed to play a pivotal role in organizational success and failure. In contrast to prevailing top-down perspectives, this article proposes an approach to studying culture that accounts for myriad organizational subcultures, how individuals fit into those subcultures, and the causes and consequences of shifts in culture and cultural fit. The language through which people communicate with colleagues offers a powerful lens for studying cultural dynamics and its relationship to individual, group, and organizational success. This article describes a burgeoning stream of research that uses language as a window into culture and discusses its implications for managerial practice.

How does cultural heterogeneity in an organization relate to its underlying capacity for execution and innovation? Cultural diversity is commonly thought to present a tradeoff between task coordination and creative problem solving, with diversity arising primarily through cultural differences between individuals. In contrast, we propose that diversity can also exist within persons when individuals hold multiple cultural beliefs about the organization. We refer to these different forms as interpersonal and intrapersonal cultural heterogeneity. We argue that the former tends to undermine coordination and portends worsening firm profitability, while the latter facilitates creativity and supports greater patenting success and more positive market valuations. To evaluate these propositions, we use computational linguistics to identify cultural content in employee reviews of nearly 500 publicly traded firms on a leading company review website and then develop novel, time-varying measures of cultural heterogeneity. Our empirical results lend support for our two core propositions, suggesting the need to rethink the performance tradeoffs of cultural heterogeneity: it may be possible to reap the creativity benefits of higher intrapersonal heterogeneity and, at the same time, the efficiency benefits of lower interpersonal heterogeneity.

How do organizations reconcile the cross-pressures of conformity and differentiation? Existing research predominantly conceptualizes identity as something an organization has by virtue of the products or services it offers. Drawing on constructivist theories, we argue that organizational members’ interactions with external audiences also dynamically produce identity. We call the extent to which such interactions diverge from audience expectations performative atypicality. Applying a novel deep-learning method to conversational text in over 90,000 earnings calls, we find that performative atypicality leads to an evaluation premium by securities analysts, paradoxically resulting in a negative earnings surprise. Moreover, performances that correspond to those of celebrated innovators are received with higher enthusiasm. Our findings suggest that firms that conform to categorical expectations while being performatively atypical can navigate the conflicting demands of similarity and uniqueness, especially if they hew to popular notions of being different.

How does cognitive diversity in a group affect its performance? Prior research suggests that group cognitive diversity poses a performance tradeoff: Diverse groups excel at creativity and innovation, but struggle to take coordinated action. Building on the insight that group cognition is not static, but is instead dynamically and interactively produced, we introduce the construct of discursive diversity, a manifestation of group cognitive diversity, which reflects the degree to which the meanings conveyed by group members in a given set of interactions diverge from one another. We propose that high-performing teams are ones that have a collective capacity to modulate shared cognition to match changing task requirements: They exhibit higher discursive diversity when engaged in ideational tasks and lower discursive diversity when performing coordination tasks. We further argue that teams exhibiting congruent modulation-that is, those with low group-level variance in members' within-person semantic shifts to changing task requirements-are more likely to experience success than teams characterized by incongruentmodulation. Using the tools of computational linguistics to derive a measure of discursive diversity and drawing on a novel longitudinal data set of intragroup electronic communications and performance outcomes for 117 remote software development teams on an online platform (www.gigster.com), we find support for our theory. Our findings suggest that the performance tradeoff of group cognitive diversity is not inescapable: Groups can navigate it by aligning their levels of discursive diversity to match their task requirements and by having members stay aligned with one another as theymake these adjustments.

How do people adapt to organizational culture, and what are the consequences or their outcomes in the organization? These fundamental questions about culture have previously been examined using self-report measures, which are subject to reporting bias, rely on coarse cultural categories defined by researchers, and provide only static snapshots of cultural fit. By contrast, we develop an interactional language use model that overcomes these limitations and opens new avenues for theoretical development about the dynamics of organizational culture. We trace the enculturation trajectories of employees in a midsized technology firm based on analyses of 10.24 million internal emails. Our language-based model of changing cultural fit (1) predicts individual attainment; (2) reveals distinct patterns of adaptation for employees who exit voluntarily, exit involuntarily, and remain employed; (3) demonstrates that rapid early cultural adaptation reduces the risk of involuntary, but not voluntary, exit; and (4) finds that a decline in cultural fit or individuals who had successfully enculturated portends voluntary departure.

Cultural fit is widely believed to affect the success of individuals and the groups to which they belong. Yet it remains an elusive, poorly measured construct. Recent research draws on computational linguistics to measure cultural fit but overlooks asymmetries in cultural adaptation. By contrast, we develop a directed, dynamic measure of cultural fit based on linguistic alignment, which estimates the influence of one person’s word use on another’s and distinguishes between two enculturation mechanisms: internalization and selfregulation. We use this measure to trace employees’ enculturation trajectories over a large, multi-year corpus of corporate emails and find that patterns of alignment in the first six months of employment are predictive of individuals downstream outcomes, especially involuntary exit. Further predictive analyses suggest referential alignment plays an overlooked role in linguistic alignment.

When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining symbolic boundaries: boundary retention—entrenching themselves in pre-existing symbolic distinctions—and boundary reformation—innovating new forms of symbolic distinction. Traditional approaches to measuring symbolic boundaries—interviews, participant-observation, and self-reports are ill-suited to detecting fine-grained variation in boundary maintenance. To overcome this limitation, we use the tools of computational linguistics and machine learning to develop a novel approach to measuring symbolic boundaries based on interactional language use between group members before and after they encounter one another. We construct measures of boundary retention and reformation using random forest classifiers that quantify group differences based on pre- and post-contact linguistic styles. We demonstrate this method's utility by applying it to a corpus of email communications from a mid-sized financial services firm that acquired and integrated two smaller firms. We find that: (a) the persistence of symbolic boundaries can be detected for up to 18 months after a merger; (b) acquired employees exhibit more boundary reformation and less boundary retention than their counterparts from the acquiring firm; and (c) individuals engage in more boundary retention, but not reformation, when their local work environment is more densely populated by ingroup members. We discuss implications of these findings for the study of culture in a wide range of intergroup contexts and for computational approaches to measuring culture.