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.

This paper examines the relationship of the policies and practices employed by 3 high school reform models -Early College High Schools, Redesigned High Schools, and High Schools That Work -with student success in college preparatory mathematics courses by the end of the 10th grade. Data on policies and practices collected through a survey of school principals in North Carolina are combined with administrative data on student course-taking and performance. The examined policies include course-taking requirements, rigorous instruction, academic support, personalization, and relevance. Results show that implementation of these policies varies across models and that higher levels of implementation of combinations of these policies are associated with improved outcomes.

How does cultural heterogeneity in an organization relate to its underlying capacity for execution and innovation? Existing literature often understands cultural diversity as presenting a tradeoff between task coordination and creative problem-solving. This work assumes that diversity arises primarily through cultural differences between individuals. In contrast, we propose that diversity can also exist within persons such that cultural heterogeneity can be unpacked into two distinct forms: interpersonal and intrapersonal. 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 unsupervised learning 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, demonstrating that a diversity of cultural beliefs in an organization does not necessarily impose a trade-off between operational efficiency and creativity. * We thank Glassdoor for providing the employee review data and Lee Fleming for sharing the patent data that we used in this study. We also thank seminar participants at University of Illinois School of Labor and Employment Relations; University of Chicago, Booth School of Business; IESE Business School; Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University; Arison School of Business at IDC Herzliya, Israel; and participants at the Lugano Organizations Conference, the Stanford/Berkeley Organizational Behavior Student Conference, the Consortium on Competitiveness and Cooperation Conference for Doctoral Student Research at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, the Carnegie School of Organizational Learning Conference, and the International Conference on Computational Social Science. We are also grateful to Lara Yang for the research support she provided. The usual disclaimer applies. 1Whether deliberatively cultivated or naturally arising, every organization develops a culture-a system of meanings and norms shared by its members. An organization's culture can influence the success of its members and the organization as a whole through its effects on individual motivation and commitment, interpersonal coordination, and group creativity and innovation (Chatman and O'Reilly, 2016). Although organizational scholars often ask how the content or intensity of culture relates to performance-for example, how shared beliefs and norms about the importance of crossfunctional collaboration can boost or diminish firm profitability-a growing literature has focused instead on the consequences of cultural heterogeneity for organizational productivity and vitality.Research in this vein asks: When is a diversity of ideas and beliefs conducive to organizational success and when is it instead detrimental? Different li...

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