Critical Review: Google's Decision-Making Culture & Its Impact

This assignment is a review of an article focusing on Google's organizational and decision-making culture. It highlights the company's user-centric business strategy, unique workplace environment that promotes employee satisfaction, risk-taking, and innovation. Google's team-based decision-making approach, reliance on data-driven insights, and open-office environment are also discussed. The review appreciates Google's ability to maintain small company values despite its global presence. The assignment concludes by raising questions about the long-term sustainability of Google's organizational culture and pointing out the article's limitations in providing specific suggestions for improvement. Desklib provides students access to similar solved assignments and study resources.

Running Head: JOURNAL ARTICLE REVIEW
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Journal Article Review
Decision-Making Culture: The Case of Google
(Student details :)
3/28/2019

Journal Article Review
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Decision-Making Culture the Case of Google: A Summary
In the article written by (Saylordot, 2019), review of organizational working culture at
Google has been presented while highlighting decision-making culture of the organization.
With the help of retrieving history of the Google, the article has focused on the origin as well
as current situation of the company’s business. Google is the search engine which is often
referred by all of the global public to search info about anything on the web. Google search
engine was a result of a student project established by 2 graduates of Stanford University
named as Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the year 1996. Later then, during 2009 Google has
become the top frequently utilised Web search engine over the internet. Besides, with the
help of other innovative applications like Google Maps, Picasa, Gmail and Google Earth the
organization has attracted its web user’s time-to-time on a wide extent (Saylordot, 2019).
Author of this article highlighted the business strategy of the Google as out of
numerous search engines; Google was the first company which put users at first place. In
addition, with the help of the mission statement of Google author summarized their
commitment towards end-user needs. The secret behind the success of the Google has been
seen as while rest companies of the world were focusing on marketing their web-sites as well
as on increasing advertising revenues, the Google uncovered their search page while
presenting with a blank page having a company logo as well as a search box for the users. On
the other hand, key reasons of the success of Google counting their employees’ job
satisfaction as well. In this context, keeping the employees satisfied and happy is a value
which has taken Google to the heart of their users (Saylordot, 2019). Moreover, Google has
created a unique workplace environment which motivates, attracts and retains the top players
within the operating field (Saylordot, 2019).

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Additionally, the author of the article wants to highlight Google’s organizational
culture of encouraging employee risk taking as well as innovative mind. The attitude of
acting fast as well as admitting the cost of subsequent mistakes being a natural result of
working has been utilised to explain why Google is performing much ahead of its competitors
like Yahoo! and Microsoft. The article has also highlighted one of the recent challenges for
the Google as expanding new fields exterior of their Web search engine commerce. Besides,
job motivational organizational culture of Google includes promoting novel ideas of their
users as well as employees. In this context, Google more often encourages all of its engineers
to spend 20 per cent of their working- time on their own innovative ideas (Saylordot, 2019).
Moreover, Google’s distinct work culture has been reflected within their decision-
making as decisions at Google are always made in teams. It means that, Google is not the
company where decision-making is done by the senior persons in charge and then only
implemented over others. At Google, it is very common for numerous small teams to address
every problem. In addition, Google’s decision-making does not include any role of gut
feeling as it has almost negligible impact over how decisions at Google are made. For an
example, during meetings, people allegedly are not permitted to use the phrases like “I
think…” but they are suggested to say “the data suggest” (Saylordot, 2019).
In order to facilitate team-work at Google, employees work within open-office
environments and hence private offices are assigned to a selected few people. The author
appreciated the way Google has maintained such unique work culture values. However,
hiring the smartest people from all around the world accumulates big egos which might be
difficult to work with. All these impossible became possible at Google as the company
considers that their strength comes through their ‘small company’ values which focus risk-

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taking, agility, as well as workplace cooperation (Saylordot, 2019). Thus, the company
always take the hiring process seriously because hiring is an extremely competitive factor.
Finally, the author of the article raised a critically important question as will this
organizational culture at Google survive in the long-run? At the end, the founders of Google
emphasized that initial public offering (referred as IPO) will not be changed from the
perspective of their work culture. Hence, the article has focused over some privacy, copyright
and data-security related recent issues which are rising worldwide. However, the article was
not able to provide useful suggestions for the organization culture, behaviours as well as
decision-making frameworks to the management of the Google. Thus, article written by
(Saylordot, 2019), has successfully highlighted the key strengths of the Google company in
terms of their unique work-culture, user-centric business, open-environment functioning and
decision-making culture so that other firms of the world can easily adopt good organizational
culture practices in future.
Discussion Questions:
1. What do you think about Google’s decision-making culture, provide your views
in either way, also describe will it help Google in the long-term?
2. What are the unique cultural factors which evolve Google’s distinct
organizational culture?
References
Saylordot. (2019). Decision-Making Culture: The Case of Google. Retrieved from Saylordot:
https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_organizational-behavior-v1.1/s15-making-
decisions.html

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