The Google Life
Like any other corporations or organizations, we cannot just explain the culture of its organization without knowing the background and history of the company first. So, I did a little research about Google and its humble beginnings.
Company Background and History Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in 1995 at Stanford University, when Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brin, a student of Stanford was assigned to show him around the university. Although, they disagreed nearly about everything in their first meeting, it didn’t stop them to build together a search engine -called “Backrub,” and was renamed Google after, with a mission “to organize the world’s information, and make it universally accessible
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was officially founded. From their dorm to garage, they finally moved to the Googleplex -their corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California. Currently, Google employed more than 60,000 employees in 50 different countries, making hundreds of products; from Pixel 2 (smartphone), to Google assistant, YouTube, Google Store, Google Play Music, Chromebook (laptops), Google Home, Chromecast and many others. Before we dig deeper to our discussions and explanations about Google’s culture and its interaction to the culture main factors, let us define organizational culture and the four factor terms meaning, to get a better understanding how organizational culture affects the company. According to Jones and George, “organizational culture is the shared set of beliefs, expectations, values, and norms that influence how members of an organization relate to one another and cooperate to achieve the organization’s goals” (328). Moreover, it is formed by the interaction of four main factors: characteristics of organizational members, the employment relationship, organizational structure, and organizational ethics.
Google’s Characteristics of Organizational
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Tall and highly centralized structures are more like a mechanistic organization which “the authority is centralized, tasks and rules are clearly specified, and employees are closely supervised” (Jones and George, 55) because employees in tall and centralized structures have little personal independence, obey authority or focus on being careful since practicability and stability are chosen goals (332). Whereas, flat and decentralized structures are more of an organic structure, wherein the authority is decentralized to middle and first-line managers to encourage them to take responsibility and act quickly (55) because in flat and decentralized structures employees have more freedom to choose and control their own activities, and norms that emphasis on being creative (332), and this is what Google company structures built into. For example, they let their employees choose their time when to show up to work; encourage great ideas and give them a lot of freedom to attain their goals -which is the opposite of tall and centralized