Integrating culture and diversity in decision making: the CEO and organizational culture profile
Introduction
Culture of a workplace reflects the values and attitudes and beliefs of an organization. Culture reflects shared assumptions by a group of people that helps them mitigate challenges and work towards a common goal. Culture is an extremely important element that organizations need to ensure that is well balanced and also helps creating an effective work environment. Culture helps in external adaptation and internal integration (Schein, 2010). Culture brings together the employees and ensures similar behaviour in them. The company chosen for the assignment is Google. The paper is focused on identifying, evaluating and justifying the organisational culture at Google.
Background of the company
Google is one of the leading companies in the ICT industry. The company offers a wide range of product portfolio. Some of the most popular products and services of Google includes search engine Google.com, Email services Gmail, Google Earth, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Drive, etc. Co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company was established in 1998 (Official website of Google, n.d.). The mission of the company is to make it convenient for people to search what they wanted on the web. They had this mission at a time when web was unorganized. Thus, based on the mathematical term googol, Google search engine was developed. The company booked its profits for the first time in 2001. Presently Google is a multibillion dollar company, of which majority of its revenue generates from advertisements. The number of employees has grown manifold. In the recent past, there was a change in management at Google when Larry Page became the CEO replacing Eric Schmidt (Official website of Google, n.d.).
The company is known for being dynamic, aggressive and innovative (Nonaka, 2005). The company has presence across the globe and supports the notion of having an open culture. It is also required that there be focus on creation of trust and well organized communication within the organization in order to sustain the dynamic culture of the organization. Google strongly believes that if there is sufficient motivation and facility as well as training. These make it possible for the employees to work productively and with higher effectiveness. The dynamism of the organisational culture at Google helps it overcome the challenges of change management and diversified cultural dimensions.
As Google is a multinational business, it adapts multiculturalism (Google’s Multicultural workforce, 2009). Multiculturalism allows for flexibility and cultural adaptability. Adapting an open culture is most suitable for the company based on the nature of work, the kind of employees at Google and cultural orientation. Of the 20000 employees at Google, majority of them are of foreign origin. A large number of the employees are on work visas (Google’s Multicultural workforce, 2009).
Justifying the how culture at Google reflects multiculturalism
The organisational culture is often reflected in its infrastructure, human resources policies, promoting inequality and eliminating discrimination, values of the organisation, etc. The company maintains the environment of being “a small company” that can provide the employees with channels of open communication and reduce the impact of hierarchy. The company believes that inhibition kills innovation. So, the focus is on promoting innovation by reducing inhibitions caused by hierarchical barriers, and promoting equality. To provide a sense of unity the employees at Google are often referred to as ‘Googler’ (Official website of Google, n.d.). This is done with an objective to develop a sense of belongingness among the employees, so that they do not just feel like being employees at Google and also consider being a part of Google as an important personality trait. Being a large multinational company, imbibing the idea of being a ‘Googler’ can help people overcome the barriers of cultural diversity.
To celebrate multiculturalism, and uphold its international perspective and ambition of being the global leader, the office of Google at Mountain View has workrooms that are that are named after global cities (Google’s Multicultural workforce, 2009). In case of issues with getting an employee to work at the UD office of Google due legal and visa related issues, the company places them in their offices at Britain, or Canada from where they can work via video conferencing. To uphold its culture of multiculturalism, the company ensures that it has strong administrative support for overseas employees. Google has a very experienced immigration team which is responsible for processing immigration documents and also handle related crisis situation and counseling international employees (Google’s Multicultural workforce, 2009).
Factors that caused the company to embody this culture
Culture is an important driving force that motivates employees and ensures higher productivity of workforce; thus in turn meet the strategic goals and profitability of an organisation (McLean, 2005). It is the organisation culture that has the strongest impact on a company to make it innovative (Kaasa & Vadi, 2008). Culture forms the basis for innovations. Innovation and creativity are the key differentiators for Google and helps the company gain competitive advantage. Innovation is the key to organisational structure at Google. For being innovative, an orgnisation needs to evaluate and develop an understanding of the aspects that promote innovativeness and that hinder innovativeness. Culture is one such crucial aspect. The “Big 10” Innovation Killers identifies culture as a key influencer on innovation (Kaasa & Vadi, 2008). The important culture aspects that impact innovation are openness to accept new ideas, attitude of the employees to take risk and be innovative, the readiness of the employees to capitalise on opportunities related to innovation (Kaasa & Vadi, 2008). Google is known for its innovations that have led to some major changes led to redefining the ICT industry.
Leadership style at Google
Management of an organisaiton and its organisational culture are closely linked. So, the management and leadership style is largely responsible for developing the organisation culture (Denison, 1990). As Google promotes a small company feel and cuts the barriers of hierarchy, a key leadership style needed to be used in the company is participative leadership. This will help to maintain open channels of communication and motivate employees to improve productivity by making them feel valued (Burn, 2011). Another important style of leadership appropriate for the company is transformational leadership. This is because to be innovative, it is important for the company to have a strong vision and be creative to take risks and be innovative. The leaders need to attract the employees and bind them closely to the vision by making them believe in the feasibility of the vision(Burn, 2011). Developing a vision and translating it into action is an important characteristic of a transformational leader. Moreover, transformational leaders have high optimism, confidence and strong decision making capabilities (Burn, 2011).
Change of culture needed in case of declining demand
Orgsanisational culture and change management in an organisaton are closely related. It is important to have an effective management and leadership that can help create a higher level of commitment for change implementation and also ensure sustainability. In case of decline in demand the company needs to ensure that it continue with the existing organisational culture. This will help the employees to remain motivated in the tough times and to believe in themselves. This will also help them to believe that their collective effort can help the company mitigate the challenges of decreased demand and remain innovative to identify newer opportunities and capitalise on them.
Conclusion
In summary, the paper identifies and evaluated the organisation culture at Google. The appropriate leadership style for Google was identified to be participative leadership and transformational leadership. It was also discussed that the company needs to continue with the existing organisational culture even when the demands decline.
References
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Denison, D. R. (1990). Corporate Culture and Organizational Effectiveness. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Nonaka, L. (2005). Knowledge management, USA, Routledge
Google’s Multicultural workforce. (2009). The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/04/12/us/20090412GOOGLE_7.html
Kaasa, A. & Vadi, M. (2008). How Does Culture Contribute To Innovation? Evidence From
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Official website of Google. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.google.com/
Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership, 4th edition. John Wiley and Sons
