The Impact of Organizational Culture on Employee Performance: A Case Study at Foreign-Invested Logistics Service Enterprises Approaching Sustainability Development

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The study aims to evaluate the impact of organizational culture on labor efficiency at foreign-invested logistics service enterprises that are on its ways towards business sustainability. The authors proposed an interesting topic and used empirical method to testify the hypotheses. However, there are some comments that may be further consideration.

 1. Authors need to provide a detailed explanation of the causes and development process of the impact of organizational culture on labor efficiency.

As authors said, they conduct the study “The impact of organizational culture on labor efficiency: A case study at foreign-invested logistics service enterprises approaching sustainability developement” to evaluate the influence of factors constituting organizational culture to labor efficiency in a sustainable way at foreign capital logistics service enterpries.

However, from the current paper, the explanation provided by the authors is insufficient and does not fully point out the motivation and research gaps about the research question.

2. The data source and processing of empirical research are unclear. It is recommended that the authors provide a table for descriptive analysis of each variable data.

3. The concept framework corresponding to the three hypotheses does not effectively reflect the content that the author wants to study, and the authors need to combine this figure with model construction.

4. Overall, the empirical research design of this article is too simplistic, and only one single regression model is difficult to support the research conclusions.

5. The research findings of this article should be oriented towards specific management practices, especially in terms of how to achieve sustainability.

 

Other minor revisions:

-All charts, including the tables in the appendix, should be titled and provide some explanation.

-Language expression requires substantial improvement.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The text expression of this article should be modified by referring to published papers in journals.

Author Response

Please see the attachment!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The abstract suggested a quantitative study of organizational culture.  I wondered where these factors of organizational culture came from. 

There were some typos in the midst of this abstract.  That was not a good start. 

Excellent to start out with Schein, a classic and noted organizational culture researcher.  I like his definition, and I could follow where this essay was going with it. 

Why do you focus on customer service in the first paragraph?  That is one of many possible aspects of organizational culture; why focus so quickly on that one? 

In the second paragraph, it was noted that in Vietnam “Organizational culture is often built fragmentarily.”  How is it normally built?  How do organizational cultures typically come to be?  Then the explanation of how this happens in Vietnam would be quite interesting. 

Lines 68 – 119 had a nice overview of what organizational culture is and how earlier research has approached it.  Some sentences were built awkwardly or missing words, but the basic overview and explanation was nice. 

Good elaboration on Schein and the three levels or layers of culture in the next section.

For H1: “Artifacts as factors of a business have positive impact on labor efficiency.”  The source of these terms are made fairly clearly in the literature review, but the specifics are not:  How will you quantitatively measure “artifacts” for the purpose of your surveys for quantitative research.  Also, how will you define and measure “labor efficiency?”  Several factors were discussed above, but it remains very unclear what you specifically mean by each of these terms. 

Same questions for H2:  “Espoused Values factors have positive impact on labor efficiency.”  Which espoused values factors will you focus on and how will you measure them?  How will labor efficiency be measured?  The basic abstract terms make sense based on the literature review, but the specifics are not clear here.

For H3:  “Assumptions factors have positive impact on labor efficiency.”  Which assumptions factors and how will you measure them?

The model on p. 6 helped a lot, and made abstract sense, but I certainly wondered how you would quantitatively measure all of these factors. 

Authors noted that “secondary data” were collected – this makes sense in a study of organizational culture, but how on earth would this be measured quantitatively to do multiple linear regression modeling?  How did this secondary data lead to the questionnaires used for primary data?  All of this was left completely unclear. 

With being so uncertain about how the concepts were constructed, and measured, how can we assess the effectiveness of the regression analyses?  We don’t know what constituted the variables, in terms of survey items or what was measured. 

It seemed that impressive statistical analyses took place, but I remained confused about what had actually been measured, and how, and thus how these “cultural elements” were actually related.

Somehow, these variables were created (line 353): 

The variable Employee Trust (NTNV) has the strongest impact, followed correspondingly by Company Ideals (LTDN), Leadership Style and Division of Power (PCLD), Business Philosophy and Business Mission Business (TLKD), People's relationship with natural environment (TCDN).

They make sense intuitively as aspects of organizational culture, but how they came to be created or defined was very unclear.  So I was not sure what these variables were actually measuring . . .

P. 10 noted some interesting findings related to leadership styles.  There is no doubt these impact organizational culture, so a clear definition of leadership styles, how this was measured, and how they related to some of these labor efficiency outcomes could be quite useful.  Yet, what “leadership style” really was in this study remained quite unclear. 

I finished reading this study wondering how it really measured aspects of organizational culture and what those concepts really meant.  It was like there was a “disconnect” between the literature review and the data analysis—logical and interesting literature review about organizational culture, and some of its practical effects, but no way to tell how variables here were defined or constructed or measured for the quantitative regression analyses.  It was impossible for me to overcome this gap and put trust in the results of the study, as a result. 

A good editing for language use, sentence structure, and word choice and spelling at times was needed.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Not good--several typos even in the abstract, mis-spelled words, some awkward sentences throughout.  Could use a good editing for smooth English language.

Author Response

Please see the attachment !

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors responded well to my comments and made corresponding revisions, I have no further comments.

Author Response

Comments 1: The authors responded well to my comments and made corresponding revisions, I have no further comments.

Response 1: Thank you very much for your feedback and positive evaluation of our revisions. We appreciate your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript.

We are pleased to hear that the changes we made addressed your comments satisfactorily. Your insights have been invaluable in improving the quality of our work.

Thank you again for your contribution to our research.