Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Third-Party Online Organizational Reviews
Date
2021-09-24
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Abstract
Online reviews of organizations through portals such as Glassdoor and Indeed are growing in popularity and have the potential to influence organizational attractiveness. This study examined how the various components of online organizational reviews affect helpfulness ratings. We examined the relationship between the sentiment of the reviews (i.e., the extent to which reviews vary from positive to negative attitudes) and helpfulness ratings, as well as the roles of organizational image, deviation from consensus in attitudes and employee status as moderators of this relationship. Part two of this study evaluated, through automated text analysis using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Structural Topic Modeling, the type of topics discussed in reviews, their influence on helpfulness votes, and how they differ based on employee status. After extracting and analyzing 24,687 reviews on Glassdoor, we found that negative reviews generally received higher helpfulness ratings which was more pronounced when they were provided by former employees and deviated from a consensus in attitudes. The topics revealed through the LDA, addressed both the instrumental and symbolic images of organizations that would facilitate inferring need-supplies and supplementary fit. They also presented differential effects on helpfulness ratings, and uniquely interacted with sentiment. These findings illustrate the impact that negative attitudes can have on helpfulness ratings, and they further highlight the need for organizations to consider the implications of how their brand images are portrayed online.
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Online organizational reviews, word-of-mouth, online recruiting, text analysis, helpfulness ratings.
Citation
Morgan, J. A. (2021). Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Third-Party Online Organizational Reviews (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.