Jillian Grennan is Assistant Professor of Finance at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business. This post is based on a recent paper by Professor Grennan; John R. Graham, D. Richard Mead, Jr. Family Professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University; Campbell R. Harvey is Professor of Finance at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University; and Shiva Rajgopal is the Kester and Byrnes Professor of Accounting and Auditing at Columbia Business School.
While there is a lot of talk about corporate culture, there is very little empirical work—because culture is very difficult to measure. In our paper, Corporate Culture: Evidence from the Field, we use a novel interview/survey method that is ideally suited to explore the questions: ‘what is culture and how do you measure it?’, ‘does culture matter?’, ‘can we attach a value to culture?’, ‘what are the implications of an ineffective culture?’, and ‘how can a more effective culture be established within the firm?’ Our paper is based on a very large sample of 1,348 executives from North American firms in the survey part and 20% of the U.S. market capitalization in the interviews. Essentially, our study creates the first large scale database of corporate culture.
The results are striking. 92% believe that improving culture will lead to increased value at their firm. Yet 84% of CEO/CFOs believe they need to improve their firm’s culture. A notable 85% believe that a poorly implemented culture increases the chances that an employee would act unethically or even illegally. While executives share a near-unanimous belief that corporate culture matters, a prerequisite to improving culture is to determine how and why culture matters.