Abstract
We study which dimensions of corporate culture are related to a firm's performance and why. We find that proclaimed values appear irrelevant. Yet, when employees perceive top managers as trustworthy and ethical, a firm's performance is stronger. We then study how different governance structures impact the ability to sustain integrity as a corporate value. We find that publicly traded firms are less able to sustain it. Traditional measures of corporate governance do not seem to have much of an impact.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 60-76 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Journal of Financial Economics |
| Volume | 117 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 1 2015 |
Funding
We thank the Great Place to Work Institute for sharing the data with us. We also thank Amy Lyman of the Great Place To Work Institute for clarifying many doubts about the data and for many and very useful comments. We are grateful to David Kreps and to participants at the NBER Conference on the Causes and Consequences of Corporate Culture and the MOVE workshop on Social Economics, Barcelona for helpful comments. We also thank two anonymous referees for their remarks and suggestions that have improved the paper considerably. Luigi Guiso gratefully acknowledges financial support from PEGGED, Paola Sapienza from the Zell Center for Risk and Research at Kellogg School of Management, and Luigi Zingales from the Stigler Center and the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. We also thank Cecilia Gamba, Lanny Lang, and Simone Lenzu for excellent research assistantship and Shastri Sandy for providing us the institutional ownership׳s data.
Keywords
- Corporate culture
- Going public
- Integrity
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Accounting
- Finance
- Economics and Econometrics
- Strategy and Management