Start Me Up: How the Initial Fit Between Researcher and Organization Predicts Outstanding Performance in Academia

Triebel, Steffen; Erhard, Lukas; Unger, Saïd; Wieczorek, Oliver; Brem, Alexander; Heiberger, Raphael

Abstract

Academic employment is marked by high mobility and significant performance pressures, particularly during the early stages of professional advancement. As early-career researchers (ECRs) change institutions frequently, they need to navigate the culture of the hiring department and may benefit from fitting in or suffer if they do not. Our study examines how this initial cultural fit shapes job performance immediately following organizational entry. Building on a theoretical perspective that conceptualizes culture as a resource, we argue that ECRs’ ability to publish outstanding work is contingent on their initial fit. We test this argument among ECRs in physics and psychology in the United States, a context defined by pronounced cultural variation across departments. Using a novel natural language processing approach, we operationalize cultural fit as the semantic similarity between a researcher’s prior work and the collective output of their new department, analyzing over 2.5 million scientific documents. Our analysis reveals that higher initial cultural fit predicts superior publication performance and that this relationship is moderated by the specialization of academic fields. This study advances our understanding of academic careers and organizational culture theory by highlighting the importance of initial cultural alignment in shaping publication outcomes and introduces a scalable and fine-grained method to measure cultural fit within organizations.