Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Case Study:
Googling in China
Date of entry:
Underlying Assumptions
An assumption or unspoken assumption is an assumption that includes the underlying
agreements made in the development of a logical argument, route of action, decision, or
judgment that are not clearly voiced nor essentially implicit by the decision maker.
Regularly, these assumptions are completed based on personal life experiences, and are
not intentionally clear in the decision making surrounding. These assumptions can be the
source of clear paradox, misunderstandings and struggle to change in human
organizational behavior. Implicit assumptions contain those moral or religious arguments,
racism, political affiliations.
Testing and Application
Espoused values were used in this case of Googling with China. These espoused values
consist of strategies, targets, plans, company regulation and philosophies. These values
are legal, which require every member in the company are given a chance to go with it.
One example is, Googles internal HR created a practice for employees to engage in
innovation. Engineers are allowed to take 20 percent of their time to focus on their own
projects. It has been said that over half of Googles products innovations each year which
includes Gmail and Google News gave life to them because of the 20 percent given
time
Values that were used in this case are observable, behaviors and surface.
Symbolic Change
This is a culture that an organization is changeable that can be manipulated by leaders.
Being created and re-created only exist to individuals as personality by group social
interaction as the culture to the organization. This culture contains organization features
and behaviors, systems, protocols, politics and processes. A culture cannot be easily
manipulated entirely or turned on or off immediately but it can be deliberately influenced.
Invisibility is usually the deepest levels of culture and because of this, it is tremendously
difficult to notice let alone change.
Google has a broad mindset when it comes to change. While they were going through a
challenge with setting up Google in China, they had to go through levels of walls to be
able to function according to their own organization value. The Chinese government did
not have the same opinion to the agreement of an unfiltered search engine and Google
announced that it would redirect searches from Google to China to Google Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is still considered as a Chinese territory but has a different political system
from Mainland China and an independent judiciary. The Chinese authorities threatened to
withdraw Googles license to operate as an Internet content provider if this continued.
Functionalist
This culture is seen as a variable in an organization as the psychological pre-dispositions
that employees in an organization own which leads them to perform in certain ways. This
culture can be independently identified through visible artefacts by observing substantial
layers of deeper meanings and basic assumptions of the culture which can be understood.
This can be possibly changed with the suggestion of culture.
This culture was implemented in Googles organization. Their internal HR created a
practice for employees to be more engage in innovation. Engineers were allowed to take
20 percent of their time to focus on their own projects. Over half of Googles products
innovations each year which includes Gmail and Google News gave life to them
because of the 20 percent given time. This has lead them to perform in a different way
to develop the organization.
Realist
A realist culture accepts employees values and beliefs will not be changed. Changing
behavior is what can be achieved within the organisation. Values and changes to the
organisation is something that cannot be measured while behavioral change and
observance is more realistic and easier than changing attitudes and values. Exterior
fundamentals of organisational culture are changeable and can be influenced within the
organisation and over time deeper underlying assumptions can change.
During the early stage of staff meeting, it was set out clearly: Dont be evil. We believe
strongly that in the long term, we will be better served- as shareholders and in all other
ways- by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short
term gains. This is an important characteristic of our culture and is broadly shared within
the company.
With this, fundamentals can start within the organization and in time assumptions can
change.
Organization Development