The average company in the MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500 sample had 2,182 reviews, representing about 4% of its total employment. The source also characterizes the average company as having over 2,000 employee reviews, equivalent to about three full-length books' worth of textual data.

Culture 500 Sample Size per Company

A large sample of reviews is not enough for accurate culture measurement unless the reviews accurately represent the views of the company's workforce as a whole.

Review Representativeness Requirement for Culture Measurement

A single Glassdoor review could reflect one employee's idiosyncratic view, but aggregating hundreds or thousands of reviews paints an accurate picture of a company's culture.

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Glassdoor reviewers use rich and varied language when describing culture. That language paints a nuanced picture of corporate culture, but it also defies simplistic approaches to textual analysis.

Glassdoor Open-Text Reviews for Culture Insight

MIT Sloan Management Review project page on measuring culture in leading companies, including the Culture 500 dataset. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/measuring-culture-in-leading-companies/

MIT Sloan Management Review

In the MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500 analysis, 93% of employees discuss some element of culture in their reviews, and 41% discuss one or more of the Big Nine values.

Prevalence of Culture Discussion in Glassdoor Reviews

Aggregating Glassdoor Reviews for Accurate Culture Assessment

A common concern with online reviews is that they can skew toward a polarized distribution, with many glowing reviews, a disproportionate number of extremely negative reviews, and relatively few moderate opinions. This pattern is documented across settings such as Amazon products and Yelp restaurants, and it occurs when users with extremely positive or extremely negative views are especially motivated to write reviews.

Polarization Risk in Online Reviews

Reviews might not present an accurate picture of organizational culture if companies incentivize or pressure employees to write glowing evaluations.

Employer Pressure as a Threat to Glassdoor Review Accuracy

When describing culture, Glassdoor reviewers use rich and varied language, including slang, idioms, acronyms, buzzwords, and colorful phrases. For a topic such as integrity, employees used many synonyms, antonyms, idioms, and slang terms.

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