Corporate Culture Explained by Mission and Vision Statements Using Natural Language Processing

The study of corporate culture has a long-standing tradition in social sciences. With the advent of global digitalization, corporations are striving for winning culture strategies with the ambition to integrate seamlessly into the digital revolution and thus to succeed in the competitive, global market. During the last two years, research into the evaluation and transformation of corporate culture leveraging Natural Language Processing techniques has become increasingly notable. One interesting question that exists in this context is: can we reasonably explain corporate culture via analyzing corporations' mission, vision, and strategy statements? To tackle this problem, first we have collected some representative mission, vision, and strategy statements from 257 corporations operating in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Subsequently, leveraging word and sentence embedding models in Natural Language Processing, we have measured the so-called Big-9 cultural values: agility, collaboration, customer, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance, and respect. Furthermore, the corporate culture reflected in texts of mission and vision has been validated using the external datasets from MyCareerGate, x28, and Glassdoor Culture 500, showing the preliminary effectiveness of our proposed methods and the potential challenges in evaluating corporate culture. Finally, more strategic solutions have been suggested regarding which firsthand data must be additionally collected and how to leverage these data for a comprehensive assessment of corporate culture.