Fitting in or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness

A recurring theme in sociological research is the tradeoff between fitting in and standing out. Recent work examining this tension has privileged network structural accounts over cultural explanations. We remedy this imbalance by developing 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) but hurts highly constrained actors.