Introduction
The history of Google, Inc. takes root from 1996 when a search engine using webpage links arranged by relevance was built by Larry Page and Sergey Brin (About Google, 2016). Google was founded in 1998 and has grown to serve millions of users over the globe. In September 2008, Google Chrome was launched, and the company now runs under the official executive chairman Eric Schmidt.
Mission
The mission statement of the incorporated is presented as follows: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (About Google, 2016, para. 1). As the mission is further expanded in their corporate philosophy, Google is mostly user-oriented. Its products and services are designed according to the users’ preferences, and it invests in extensive research to optimize the users’ experience.
As a result, it provides net search opportunities in more than 120 languages and is aimed at making information globally accessible (Manimala & Wasdani, 2013). Google’s leadership model is derived directly from its philosophy and mission.
Google prides itself on distributed leadership model, allowing its employees to make and implement decisions (Manimala & Wasdani, 2013). Functionally, the vision is communicated to the employees from the Board of Directors via Executive Management group which is a common model. Apart from that, the company encourages individual accomplishments and tries to optimize the employees’ workplaces and benefit them in every way to boost their creativity.
Such leadership style is actively deployed by Google’s board of directors, especially Eric Schmidt, the current chairman. Back in the 2000s, Schmidt was thought to lack the qualities necessary for aggressive revenue-oriented advertisement (Manimala & Wasdani, 2013). However, the fact that a job at Google is so desirable can be largely attributed to the merit of Schmidt.
The leadership style at Google, Inc. can be deemed unconventional in that it seems to combine the features of distributed leadership and emotional intelligence. The main component of the model is employee empowerment (Gio & Yazdanifard, 2015).
As said, the vision is communicated via Executive Management; the goal is to assure that the goals are clear to every employee so that they can derive their decisions and strategies from that. Other points include being a good coach, promoting teamwork as well as individual accomplishments, and ensuring the employees’ well-being. Over the years, Schmidt has devised some strategic moves to keep the employees motivated. Such motivating factors include ensuring the employees are personally committed to the issues they are to resolve and timely evaluation and rewarding of both the individual and team performance (Manimala & Wasdani, 2013).
What is more, the evaluating should be conducted by a person or group of persons whose appraisal is truly significant for the employees. Considering that it is only the corporate vision that gets communicated to the employees (the ways to implement the vision are up to the employees to devise), personal commitment is the key aspect for Google’s leadership.
Organizational Structure
As it can be seen, it is mainly the personal commitment – and encouraging such commitment in the employees – that makes Google Inc.’s leadership different from other giants. As to the organizational structure, the company has made it densely intertwined with the employee-empowering culture they foster. Subsequently, Google’s organizational structure can be characterized by its function-, product-, and employee-orientedness.
As it was said, employees are encouraged to set and achieve individual goals, but that does not nullify the team grouping and team performance considerations. The functional factor is one of the factors determining exactly how the teams are grouped (Fields of Work, 2016). The teams include, for instance, Sales, Services, and Support team, Design team, Product Management team, and more. Another target for Google is product and innovation.
For that sake, the company can group its employees basing primarily on the product they are supposed to develop. The company has a variety of projects running under a diversity of brands, for which it has management and development teams. Also, in addition to the fact that groups and individual employees are given relative freedom to decide how to implement the corporate vision and are widely engaged in problem-solving (which is a marker of distributed leadership), the company’s organizational structure can be characterizes as flat (Claver-Cortes, Pertusa-Ortega, & Molina-Azorin, 2012).
The meaning is that the employees are capable of producing reports and sending them directly to the Board of Directors. In addition, the company allows knowledge-sharing, creating a perpetual information flow in between the teams and individuals.
Overall, the organizational structure and culture of Google, Inc. are a fair reflection of its stated mission. The company’s culture is open and focused on employee empowerment, acknowledging personal input in the corporate well-being. The organizational structure is compliant with the company’s morale and ethical stance. The enlisted points summarize the leadership’s moves that not only make Google, Inc. unique but also played their parts in facilitating the company’s growth from “good” to “great” to something entirely different. They are simple yet powerful enough to have made Google what it is and set a steady pace for further development.
References
About Google. (2016). Web.
Claver-Cortes, E., Pertusa-Ortega, E. M., & Molina-Azorin, J. F. (2012). Characteristics of organizational structure relating to hybrid competitive strategy. Journal of Business Research, 65(7), 993-1002.
Gio, T. H. Y., & Yazdanifard, R. (2015). The Unconventional Leadership of Corporate Leaders in the 21st Century. Global Journal of Management and Business Research, 15(4), 65-70.
Fields of Work. (2016). Web.
Manimala, M. J., & Wasdani, K. P. (2013). Distributed leadership at Google: Lessons from the billion-dollar brand. Ivey Business Journal, 77(3), 12.