Google's Organizational Culture and Success

Google's Organizational Culture and Success

In his book Organizational Culture and Leadership, Schein defines the culture as: “The climate and practices that organizations develop around their handling of people, or to the espoused values and credo of an organization”.

We can analyze Google’s organizational culture thought Ouchi’s framework. Ouchi studied three different company’s culture and saw that the differences between those explained a part of the company’s success. Depending on his theory it seems that Google Inc. is the type Z US firms.

Cultural characteristics Type J (Japonese model) Type A (typical American model Type Z (credited American model)

Commitment to employees Life contract Short term contract Long term contract

Evaluation Slow and qualitative Fast and quantitative Slow and qualitative

Careers Large and not based on specialty Very narrowed and specialty based Moderately based on specialty

Control Implicit and informal Explicit and formal Implicit and informal

Decision making Grouped and consensual Individual Grouped and consensual

Responsibility Collective Individual Individual

Concern for people Holistic (firm and family) Narrowed (individual tasks) Global (individual at work)

Google tries to retain its employees and evaluate them in a quantitative but also qualitative manner. In fact, the company made its work environment colorful and vehicles the image of a fun place to work through what it proposes. For example, employees can have free snacks or bring their pet at the office or go to the gym etc... Employees can benefit from flexible working hours and have some time for their self-directed projects which shows the importance of the creativity and innovation from each and in every departmen...

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...ip rotating…etc. They have also set up the self directed projects. Employees can thus spend a part of their time in creating and developing their own projects. Larry and Sergey based themselves on their own experience and permitted to their employees to have also a personal project. They also gave a big autonomous to their project teams, that participate to provide horizontal communication, and thus the share of experiences.

The leaders of Google have well understood the means to make Google’s company different to the other companies. They established since the beginning an original way of work, controlling the recruitment of the new members, and imposing their vision on the employees.

“Because they had the original idea, they will typically have their own notion, based on their own cultural history and personality, of how to fulfill the idea” (Schein 2004 p.227)