How do people adapt to organizational culture and what are the consequences for their outcomes in the organization? These fundamental questions about culture have previously been examined using self-report measures, which are subject to reporting bias, rely on coarse cultural categories defined by researchers, and provide only static snapshots of cultural fit. In contrast, we develop an interactional language use model that overcomes these limitations and opens new avenues for theoretical development about the dynamics of organizational culture. We trace the enculturation trajectories of employees in a mid-sized technology firm based on analyses of 10.24 million internal emails. Our language-based model of changing cultural fit: (1) predicts individual attainment; (2) reveals distinct patterns of adaptation for employees who exit voluntarily, exit involuntarily, and remain employed; (3) demonstrates that rapid early cultural adaptation reduces the risk of involuntary, but not voluntary, exit; and (4) finds that a decline in cultural fit for individuals who had successfully enculturated portends voluntary departure.Key words : organizational culture, enculturation, cultural fit, attainment, linguistic accommodation IntroductionOrganizational scholars have long recognized the importance of culture in shaping individual, group, and organizational success. For example, culture features prominently in research on the efficacy of newcomer socialization (e.g., Ashforth and Saks 1996), the productivity of groups and teams (e.g., Chatman et al. 1998), and organizational performance following the merger of two firms (e.g., Weber and Camerer 2003). Although the definitions of culture have varied somewhat across these research streams, prior research has tended to treat organizational culture as a static construct and therefore emphasized the importance of achieving cultural fit-an informal threshold that an organizational member either ultimately succeeds, or fails, to cross (Van Maanen and Schein 1979, Ashford and Nurmohamed 2012)-for various indicators of performance (O'Reilly et al. 1991, Rivera 2012). Yet organizational enculturation is a dynamic and ongoing process. Cultural fit, therefore, is an elastic construct. In this paper, we examine the question: How is the specific temporal pattern of a person's cultural compatibility with colleagues in an organization related to her career outcomes in that setting?Although some prior work assumes that cultural fit can change over time, especially during early newcomer adjustment to an organization (Bauer et al. 2007, Chatman 1991, compelling theoretical accounts of the dynamics and consequences of cultural fit remain largely absent from the literature (Shipp and Jansen 2011). We trace this paucity of theoretical development to a methodological source: the tools that have heretofore been used to measure culture within organizations-such as participant observation (Kunda 2006, Van Maanen 1991 or self-report surveys (e.g., O'Reilly et al. 1991, Jones 1986, Hofstede et al. 2010,...

A recurring theme in sociological research is the tradeoff between fitting in and standing out. Prior work examining this tension has tended to take either a network structural or a cultural perspective. We instead fuse these two traditions to develop a theory of how structural and cultural embeddedness jointly relate to individual attainment within organizations. Given that organizational culture is hard to observe, we develop a novel approach to assessing individuals' cultural fit with their colleagues in an organization based on the language expressed in internal email communications. Drawing on a unique data set that includes a corpus of 10.25 million email messages exchanged over five years among 601 employees in a high-technology firm, we find that network constraint impedes, while cultural fit promotes, individual attainment. More importantly, we find evidence of a tradeoff between the two forms of embeddedness: cultural fit benefits individuals with low network constraint (i.e., brokers), while network constraint promotes attainment for those with low cultural fit.Fitting in or Standing Out 3

A recurring theme in sociological research is the tradeoff between fitting in and standing out. Prior work examining this tension has tended to take either a network structural or a cultural perspective. We instead fuse these two traditions to develop a theory of how structural and cultural embeddedness jointly relate to individual attainment within organizations. Given that organizational culture is hard to observe, we develop a novel approach to assessing individuals' cultural fit with their colleagues in an organization based on the language expressed in internal email communications. Drawing on a unique data set that includes a corpus of 10.25 million email messages exchanged over five years among 601 employees in a high-technology firm, we find that network constraint impedes, while cultural fit promotes, individual attainment. More importantly, we find evidence of a tradeoff between the two forms of embeddedness: cultural fit benefits individuals with low network constraint (i.e., brokers), while network constraint promotes attainment for those with low cultural fit.Fitting in or Standing Out 3

How do people adapt to organizational culture and what are the consequences for their outcomes in the organization? These fundamental questions about culture have previously been examined using self-report measures, which are subject to reporting bias, rely on coarse cultural categories defined by researchers, and provide only static snapshots of cultural fit. In contrast, we develop an interactional language use model that overcomes these limitations and opens new avenues for theoretical development about the dynamics of organizational culture. To illustrate the power of this approach, we trace the enculturation trajectories of employees in a mid-sized technology firm based on analyses of 10.24 million internal emails. Our languagebased measure of changing cultural fit: (1) predicts individual attainment; (2) reveals distinct patterns of adaptation for employees who exit voluntarily, exit involuntarily, and remain employed; and (3) demonstrates that rapid early cultural adaptation reduces the risk of involuntary, but not voluntary, exit.