Organizational culture and performance. The case of Google

Abstract

Organizational culture, as a social science concept, has been studied in a range of disciplines from social anthropology to organizational psychology. Corporate culture is used as a concept to denote a more commercialized approach to organizational culture. In recent years there has been a significant emphasis on the concept of organizational culture, as a critical component of day-to-day organizational functioning, and there has been a strong realization that the performance of organizations depends to a large extent on the culture they have developed within them. This is also a very difficult point for any modern manager. Culture can be understood as the invisible side of an iceberg, occupying the most important volume of the structure. The visible part at the level of organizations, can concern what is perceived daily, such as behaviors, final judgments, etc. Managers must successfully manage the invisible—the invisible attitudes and perceptions of employees, departments, and the ways in which they all intertwine and ultimately affect performance. In the same context, individual performance is a vital factor for organizations. When employees begin to underperform, managers try to address it before it affects the entire department, organization, etc. Often, individual performance is attempted to be resolved, without considering the culture, or the root cause of the problem. Often managers may not realize that they are not individual therapists—since culture is beyond them, what they can do is ensure that an employee can meet the demands of the existing culture. At the same time, they must successfully manage the fluid, ever-changing external environment (which demands the ensuring of the satisfaction of increasingly heterogeneous interest groups). The purpose of the work is to investigate job satisfaction, organizational culture and the subjective well-being of employees. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect that the organizational culture of a company has on the selection and evaluation of personnel, while its objectives are to investigate the selection criteria of candidates based on the culture of the company and the degree to which the corporate culture affects the attitude of the executives to integrate the employees into the culture of the company. The present paper dealt with the above demands, utilizing the culture of the Google Company as a case study. In this way, an attempt was made to derive useful conclusions and suggestions for Greek organizations.