Culture and Diversity in Decision Making: Google - Term Paper Example

Culture and Diversity in Decision Making: Google Culture and Diversity in Decision Making: Google Google is a successful information technology company founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page with offices in 43 countries and over 21,000 employees. Google offers web applications for many kinds of tasks and provides advertising services with Google search engine being the most used search engine globally. Google has its corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California with the offices in countries like China, Denmark, Finland, India, Australia, Turkey, Israel, and United Arab Emirates among other locations (Google, 2009). Google provides employees with the best benefits in the industry and is ranked among the companies regarded as best employers globally. The achievements at Google globally are in one way or another related to corporate culture and diversity at Google forming the basis of the research that aims at analysing the Google culture, reasons for the culture, suitable leader for the culture identified, and change in culture to tame demand deficiency. Organizational culture involves the manner in which work is done in an organization characterised by shared values, practices, behaviour, attitudes, and goals of an organization, institution, firm or group (Herling et al., 2008). The Google culture is a high-performance culture that ensures the employees and management work together in harmony in achieving the best results for the company and the personal development of the employees (Google, 2009). The determination of the high-performance culture at Google came about from the different measures undertaken at Google to achieve the culture. The measures include taking paramount importance on goals and values at Google with each employee hired on the basis of sharing the same goals and values (Finney, 2008). The impact is that employees who are innovative and able to sustain high performance in an organization are chosen and inducted for high performance at Google. The culture is also evidenced by the flexibility of structures including fewer formal meetings and no strict dressing code and cross communication allowing for free information sharing between the employees and the management/leadership at Google. Agreement with the goals and values at Google by the employees allows Google staff to provide 100% dedication to high-performance meeting the culture at Google. Other signs that depicted a high-performance culture at Google are that employees take responsibility and are tasked with decision-making aimed at solving problems without having to seek permission reducing bureaucratic red tape. The effect is that each employee is accountable for performance ensuring they achieve the best performance possible depicting the high-performance culture at Google (Finney, 2008). A happy working environment and satisfaction by the employees creates depicts the high-performance culture at Google. Google high-performance culture is evidenced by the success the company has achieved over the years and the continued success it is currently enjoying showing that all is going on smoothly and high performance is a culture and not a onetime event. Teamwork at Google is at its best and employees push and support each other to deliver and provide the best performance depicting the culture at Google. Provision of training and development opportunities for the employees allows the employees to have confidence and be in a position to use new skills for better performance meeting the culture needs for Google. Several factors necessitated the choice of high-performance culture sat Google including the high quality of the management. High-quality management allowed for maintenance of trust relations with the employees resulting in their belief that they are being valued necessitating high performance from them. The management also creates and maintains individual relations with employees, shows commitment, respect and strong ethical standards and codes, having consistency and credibility and in turn requiring the same from the employees allowing for high performance culture at Google. The other factor that resulted in the choice of a high-performance culture at Google is the presence of openness for employees to take certain decisions and be responsible for them. Personal responsibility and a chance to be innovative by the employees results in high performance. Employees opinions and frequent dialogue, allowance for risk taking, and consideration of mistakes as learning chances allows employee creativity, enhances flexibility, and makes employees responsible and drive change allowing fort high performance. Employees are free to make decisions and receive good benefits, and compensation resulting in the consideration that Google has a baseball team culture, but it is aimed at achieving high performance as a whole hence it is part of the high-performance culture of Google. The other factor that necessitated Google having a high-performance culture is striving for innovation and continuous improvement. Employees and management are tasked with a need to work efficiently and effectively, eliminate unnecessary procedures, and continuously align and improve processes that can only be achieved when a high-performance culture is in place. The other factor that allowed Google to have a high-performance culture is the high quality of the workforce hired. The presence of a diverse and complementary management and employee team allows for creativity and innovativeness that has allowed Google to produce high performance (Witte & Muijen, 2000). The Google workforce, owing to the diversity, allows for maximum flexibility and learns from each other aiding one another achieve high performance. Training and skill development initiatives at Google, motivation for excellent performance and holding employees responsible for best performance improve the quality of the workforce. An innovative leader is suited for Google because it will result in the creation of a work environment allowing for innovative thinking, problem-solving, and development of new products at Google (Sloane, 2007). An innovative leader will bring new thinking and actions, and open new horizons for Google that has achieved great success in preceding years. An innovative leader will have a number of impacts at Google including increased risk taking for all the employees and management and acceptance of failure as a learning process for the achievement of success especially in the development of new products and services. The other impacts of an innovative leader on Google include the augmented with respect for every person’s idea despite their position or rank at the organization and the increased satisfaction and enjoyment by the employees of their work. A change in culture at Google to respond to a fall in the services and products offered include the need to be more focussed on the needs of the clients and understand their changing needs better. Through innovation and skill set in the organization, new products or an improvement of the products and services currently offered will aid in dealing with the reducing demand. Another change to the culture will be improving the communication abilities of the employees and the customers to promote ideas and insight from the customers resulting in input of feedback to product and service provision augmenting demand. Another culture change involves the development of service and product oriented management and employee outlook to ensure the product and service provided meet the needs of the employees to generate more demand. It is evident that culture in an organization plays a monumental role in the development and success of an organization both in the domestic and international market. Organization culture can be termed as the glue that holds an organization together in terms of the performance of work and the responsibility to which each employee is accorded when they are tasked with job completion. Google’s success is attributed to the presence of a high-performance culture at the company that ensures everyone in the organization regardless of rank or position strives to provide high performance. Innovative leadership is the most suitable leadership style for Google because of its orientation in the technology field that required innovation and new product development frequently for long-term success. A change in the market condition exemplified by a fall in demand necessitates a culture change to ensure the organization is in a better position to respond to market changes effectively. References Finney, M. I. (2008). Building high-performance people and organizations. Westport, Conn: Praeger. Google. (2009). The Best Place to Work. Retrieved 2009, from Google Diversity and Inclusion: http://www.google.com/corporate/diversity/bestplace.html Hierling, M., Yeh, Y.-C., Tai, C. S. Y., & Yu, J. L. (2008). Organizational culture and the case of Google: What is organizational culture and how it can influence the performance of a company. München: GRIN Verlag GmbH. Sloane, P. (2007). The innovative leader: How to inspire your team and drive creativity. London: Kogan Page. Witte, K., & Muijen, J. J. (2000). Organizational culture. Hove, East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press. Read More