How does a ‘bro culture’ influence employee turnover and organizational performance? We conceptualize masculinity in an organizational culture as the degree to which an organization emphasizes prototypically masculine attributes as strengths while suppressing prototypically feminine attributes as weaknesses and explore the role of masculine culture in employee turnover and organizational performance. Using employee review data sourced from Glassdoor, we create a novel measure of masculine culture by applying a machine learning technique. Integrating insights from the gender and culture research, we show that masculine culture is likely to affect employee turnover, which we explore with a fine-grained analysis considering variations in gender and seniority levels. In addition, we find that the organizational consequences of a masculine culture extend beyond turnover, adversely influencing performance. We also show an underlying mechanism for the effects of masculine culture on performance. The findings highlight the importance of probing inside the gendered aspects of culture in organizations to understand its implications on organizational outcomes.
