It’s hard to think of a company that has experienced more success in the past 10 years than Google. What started out as a student project by two Stanford graduates turned into one of the most recognizable companies of all time. The two masterminds behind the relatively simple, yet very profitable idea of the Google search engine were the founders of the company, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. These two men organized their company in a very unique and unconventional way compared to other similar companies in the industry. The organizational behavior in effect currently at Google is completely opposite of the way the company was ran when it started out with 10 employees working in a garage together in Palo Alto. Although the way Larry Page and Sergey Brin decide to run their company is vastly different from similar companies in the industry, it does not mean that the way they run their company is necessarily wrong. In fact, their search engine is the most frequently used on the internet with 1 billion searches per day and their stock has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. Before I get into the details of the organizational behavior apparent at Google I would like you to watch this short video from the Today show that I included to give you a better visual aspect of what it is like to work at Google:
After watching the video it is apparent that Larry Page and Sergey Brin truly want to show their employees that they are important to the company. While all the extra benefits, such as free gourmet meals may cost the company quite a bit in the short run the hopes of these extravagant benefits is a boost in employee performance in the long run. From the success of the company it would seem that this notion is correct. Many of the employees explain that they are happy to do almost anything for the company. The company offers other services such as healthcare and daycare services to try to eliminate all potential distractions the employees might experience. While many organizational behavior experts have found a low correlation between positive work attitudes and higher performance from employees, this does not seem to hold true at Google. Since Google is a very innovative, professional career field the link between positive work attitudes is more apparent than it would be in manual labor industries where the equipment may act as a constraint to increased productivity and performance. One thing that is definitely apparent is that employees have an increase in organizational citizenship behaviors from the great perks Google offers its employees. By offering their employees such a wide variety of benefits it helps motivate the employees to help others around them.
The expected high rate of organizational citizenship behavior from Google employees is in part from the way Page and Brin decided to set up the organizational structure of the company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to implement a very flat level of hierarchy in which top level management is only one step up from lower level employees. The company doesn’t concentrate on a hierarchy, but rather decides to organize into small, creative teams. In these small teams individual projects are worked on and project leaders of the teams change with nearly every new project. The members of these teams are also quite different because of the diverse makeup of Google’s employees. Google’s employees range from former CEO’s, neurosurgeons, wrestlers and even marines. The diversity of the company’s employees is what helps the company in building new innovative products and interacting so successfully in the small teams. A company such as Google strives on coming out with new innovative products and the owners of the company were so adamant in helping spark employee product development that they gave their employees 20% of their work time on self directed projects.
Do you agree with the unique way that Google’s owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up their company’s organizational structure? Do you see any potential problems that could arise from the way the Google Corporation is set up? In my upcoming posts I will go into greater depth regarding my opinion on some of the potential problems that Google may experience. I will also take a look at some of the other company owners that have implemented similar working environments and have experienced parallel success. I also look forward to hearing your opinions and thoughts on the subject. Please post your comments on this issue below and feel free to bring up new arguments as well.
-Jason Dangles-
Google's owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin have obviously proven that the unique way in which they operate their company works. I believe that employee appreciation and freedom needs to be established by organizations in developing industries, such as computer technology, in an effort to spark innovative growth for a company. Employee organizational citizenship behavior is evident in Google and this shared attribute amongst employees will only translate to a positive moral, along with better work cohesion within diverse small groups. However, the only negative possibility I could foresee arising from this corporate setup is the potential of employees feeling overly comfortable in this work environment, thus not accomplishing tasks required by the job. Currently employees accomplish tasks utilizing creativity for Google because the computer technology industry is still relatively young, and developing innovation is more on an asset for the company. My question is when does innovation slow down for Google and their competition can offer the same product to customers? If this occurs I believe that this corporate practice will then be vacated by Google because there is less of a necessity for rapid innovation, and more of a shift towards traditional business job requirements. Thus, more of a standard corporate approach will be implemented in order to compete with other companies which have caught up to the Google’s success. This is because studies have demonstrated a low correlation between work attitudes and higher employee job performance. Once innovation is less of a necessity and competition has caught up with Google I find it hard to believe that the owners will still keep the same corporate approach as evident today.
ReplyDeleteZach Seibel, Team 1
I agree with the way they are running the company, it's clearly working for them. It reminds of the company discussed in class (SAS), they want happy employees which in turn leads to productive ones. Relating to one of Hofestead's theories about culture, they clearly seem to favor having a collectivism culture and do not favor the traditional hierarchy system.
ReplyDeleteHealth care costs are going to always be on the rise, that is always a possible problem they may encounter. I do not think it will be a problem anytime soon though because Google has an insane profit margin.
Zac Long- Team 3
According to my knowledge, google has a mix type organizational structure. Its based on hierarchy and flat based structures. While management stays on the top of the structure, teams are not controlled or under them. They are individual entities that controls the pojects. Some examples can be seen in the diagram community of Creately Org Chart Software
ReplyDeleteI was reading the provided article with a great interest! This post is useful and informative. Thanks for sharing organizational structure
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