As team-based organizational structures and task complexity continue to evolve, colleague influence within organizations is on the rise. Building upon social cognitive theory and social identity theory, this study investigates how individuals’ perceptions of competent colleagues within their organization relate to their own perceived promotion opportunities. Moreover, it examines the moderating effect of innovation culture, as a situational factor, regarding today’s competitive and adaptive environment. Leveraging natural language processing techniques, this research analyzes 329,916 online reviews from 2,007 companies. The findings reveal a positive and significant association between competence perceptions of colleagues and perceived promotion opportunities. Notably, innovative culture weakens this relationship. This underscores the role of competent colleagues as a form of social capital and provides implications for how characteristics of innovation culture may diminish their impact. Furthermore, this study introduces a methodological approach to measure psychological concepts from text data, contributing to applying natural language processing in psychology.