New data shows that leadership quality shapes nearly every dimension of corporate culture
In boardrooms around the world, executives speak confidently about culture.
But when employees speak anonymously, the story becomes far more precise — and far more revealing.
A new large-scale analysis by The Economist in partnership with CultureX examined employee feedback from 900 companies across 19 industries, uncovering a critical truth:
Company culture is not one thing — and leadership quality determines almost everything.
How the Study Worked: Listening to Employees at Scale
Rather than relying on executive surveys or corporate messaging, CultureX analyzed hundreds of thousands of anonymous employee reviews submitted on Glassdoor between January 2023 and April 2025.
Using a custom-built AI and natural-language processing model, employee comments were classified into 200+ culture-related topics, then grouped into nine core cultural dimensions supported by academic research:
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Leadership
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Support
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Toxicity
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Work–life balance
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Agility
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Candour
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Innovation
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Strategy
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Transparency
Each company was benchmarked against peers in its own industry, revealing how far it deviated above or below the norm.
Employee Reviews on Glassdoor
Business Consulting
The Central Finding: Leadership Drives Everything Else
Across industries and regions, one pattern stood out clearly:
Companies with strong leadership scores consistently perform better across nearly all other cultural dimensions.
High leadership quality correlates with:
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Lower toxicity
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Higher agility
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Better work–life balance
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Greater candour and transparency
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In contrast, weak leadership often coincides with:
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Rising toxic behaviors
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Silence instead of candour
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Strategic confusion
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Cultural fragmentation
In short, culture does not collapse randomly — it follows leadership behavior.
Employee Reviews on Glassdoor
Business Services
Why “Good Culture” Is the Wrong Question
One of the study’s most important insights challenges a common executive assumption.
Companies are often labeled as having either a good or bad culture.
The data shows this framing is misleading.
Organizations can be strong in some cultural dimensions while failing badly in others.
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For example:
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High innovation but poor support
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Strong strategy but toxic leadership
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Agile teams with low transparency
This explains why many transformation initiatives fail:
leaders attempt to “fix culture” without understanding which dimensions are broken — and why.
Employee Reviews on Glassdoor
Consumer Products
The Role of Trust, Candour, and Psychological Safety
Several of the more nuanced dimensions proved especially revealing:
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Support measures whether employees feel their leaders genuinely care
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Candour captures whether people feel safe speaking up
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Toxicity reflects how much disrespect is tolerated
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Transparency evaluates how information flows inside the organization
These are not HR metrics.
They are leadership signals — perceived daily, not declared annually.
As Don Sull, co-founder of CultureX and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains:
The goal is not to force companies into a single, uniform culture —
but to understand which cultural attributes employees actually value,
and how leadership choices shape them.
Why This Matters Now
Post-pandemic organizations face:
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Hybrid work complexity
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Talent mobility
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AI-driven restructuring
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Rising employee skepticism
In this environment, culture has become measurable — and leadership has become visible.
Employees may not use executive language.
But at scale, their words form patterns that no strategy deck can hide.
Employee Reviews on Glassdoor
Financial Services
A Global Leadership Takeaway
The message from 900 companies is unmistakable:
Culture is not what leaders say.
It is what employees experience — consistently.
For executives, boards, and founders, the question is no longer:
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Do we have a strong culture?
But rather:
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Which cultural dimensions are we strengthening — and which are eroding under pressure?
Because in the end, culture doesn’t fail first.
Leadership does.
What the Data Reveals When Employees Speak Freely
To move beyond executive rhetoric, The Economist, in partnership with CultureX, analyzed anonymous employee reviews from 900 companies across 19 industries, based on feedback submitted to Glassdoor between January 2023 and April 2025.
The results reveal a strong correlation between leadership quality and workplace toxicity.
As the chart illustrates, organizations rated higher on leadership consistently experience lower levels of toxic culture, while weak leadership almost always coincides with higher toxicity.
This matters because dimensions such as candour, support, and transparency are not slogans —
they are daily leadership behaviors experienced by employees.
Employee Reviews on Glassdoor
General Retail
In other words:
Culture is not what leaders say.
It is what employees endure — or benefit from — every day.
Employee Reviews on Glassdoor
Grocery Stores
From a leadership-energy perspective, this pattern is unsurprising.
Organizations dominated by Survivor Energy prioritize control, short-term results, and self-protection — often at the cost of trust and candour.
By contrast, Life Energy leadership designs systems that reduce fear, enable voice, and sustain performance under pressure.
Source: The Economist
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