How does the arrival at a new work environment affect the performance of creative workers? Even though it is a shared experience in many careers, we know surprisingly little about the impact of transferring to an unfamiliar workplace. To test the direct and indirect effects of how creative workers fit new colleagues at scale, we need to have (i) information on career trajectories and (ii) assess the cultural fit (CF) to a work environment computationally. We address these challenges by collecting a unique dataset on early career researchers (ECR) and their transition to another university after graduating in physics and psychology between 2006 and 2015 in the US. Then, we measure the CF by utilizing unsupervised machine learning and comparing each ECR’s research to the work of their new colleagues. In a close approximation of both fields (> 2.5 million documents), our results not only show a strong impact of CF on creative performance but also that fitting-in moderates the trade-off between specialization and generalization strategies. Moreover, we reveal how high-status organizations impose social pressures that further augment the effects of CF.
