Conflict between Google and employee

Prepared by:

Desy Triana P-GSM132/20

Kung Sze Yuin P-GSM168/20

Ooi Yin Chao P-GSM211/20

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

UNIVERSITI SAINS MALAYSIA

ADC601/ Organizational Behavior

Dr. Noor Fareen Abdul Rahim & Dr. Goh Yen Nee

January 15, 2020

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Table of Contents
1. Case Background .................................................................................................................... 2

2. Case Issues related organizational behavior topic ................................................................... 5

2.1 Power and influence in the Workplace ............................................................................ 6

2.2 Ethical Values and Behavior ............................................................................................ 6

2.3 Conflict and Negotiation in the workplace ...................................................................... 7

2.4 Interpersonal Conflict-Handling Style ............................................................................. 8

2.5 Organizational Culture ..................................................................................................... 8

3. Analysis ................................................................................................................................. 10

3.1 Strength .......................................................................................................................... 10

3.2 Weakness........................................................................................................................ 10

3.3 Opportunity .................................................................................................................... 11

3.4 Threats ............................................................................................................................ 12

4. Recommendation ................................................................................................................... 13

Align artifacts with the desired culture. .................................................................................... 13

Introduce culturally consistent rewards/recognition. ................................................................ 13

Support workforce stability and communication. ..................................................................... 14

Use attraction, selection, and socialization for culture "fit." ..................................................... 14

Actions of founders and leaders. ............................................................................................... 14

5. Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 16

6. References ............................................................................................................................. 17

1. Case Background

Google is a multinational technology company originating from the U.S specializing in

Internet-related services and products, such as; online advertising technologies, cloud computing
applications, provided mapping services, software, and hardware. However, even with how
varied and rich these products are, they are all about the one thing, the root of Google: online
searching.

As one of the Big Five information technology companies in the U.S., aside from
Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook, Google is also known as the "happiest company in
tech." Their founders, Page and Brin, are human manifestations of and direct links to a
romanticized open culture that fostered creativity, even if it had no immediate benefit for the
company, but promoted internal transparency. The leadership provided internal avenues for
employees to make their voices heard on a broad local and global breadth.

Google has set up a common organizational culture for the whole office that is particular
from the others. Culture is built, reenacted, as well as reinforced through time. The primary
culture aimed at Google is an open culture. Each person in the company can freely contribute
their ideas and opinions to create a more comfortable and friendly working environment. The
following open-culture applied by Google in the workplace bring off employee satisfaction;

Tolerate mistakes and assist employee correction

At Google, consider how staff perform and helping them correct mistakes is crucial.
Instead of showing out the damage and blaming a person who caused the mistake, the company
would be interested in the cause of the problem and fix it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

With culture, employees understand how to make breakthroughs in the workplace; they
need to experiment, fail, and restate the tempt. Therefore, failures and mistakes are not terrible
there. It is possible for the right to be wrong and has the opportunity to overcome failure in
support of the superiors and colleagues. Good ideas are always encouraged at Google.

Build a stimulating work environment

Create some creativity, and innovation can easily recognize that the working environment
is one of the most critical things. Google has achieved in building an image of a creative working
place. The company designed the offices individually, not duplicated in any office. The Google


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working environment is so comfortable that employees will not think of it as a working room,
full of work, relaxation, exercise, reading, and watching movies. They are continually
experimenting and innovating to find the best way to satisfy the staff and help them work
effectively.

Leadership influences on the culture at Google

A leader has an intense impact on the company's culture, and Google is not an exception.
The leaders of Google are concerned more about each individual's demands and abilities, the
study of human beings' nature, and an appreciation of their staff as their clients. At Google, the
founders thought they could generate a company that people would want to work with when
creating a home-like environment.

Culture becomes an essential factor in the success of the development of a business.

Whether it is a large or a small organization, it must encounter cooperation issues among
individuals and groups. Organizational culture is the pack of shared values, beliefs, and norms
that influence the way members think, feel, and behave.

Unfortunately, In November 2019, Google faces the most significant challenges to its
culture in its 21-year history. It is almost simultaneously when their founder's Page and Brin step
aside from Google. The company fired four employees due to accusations of a severe violation
of their policies and an inappropriate breach of a trusted responsibility. (Vox.com, 2019,22 Nov).

Regarding that action, a group of around 200 Google employees and other protesters
rallied outside of the search giant's offices in San Francisco. They are demanding the company
reinstate their colleagues, whom they say were unjustly punished for workplace organizing at the
company, calling it an attack on tech accountability and transparency.

They accuse management of targeting those employees because they criticize and
organize a petition demanding the company not work with the U.S. Customs and Border
Protection (CBP). CBP is part of the immigration agencies responsible for enforcing the former
President Trump's controversial family separation policy, which has come under criticism by
human rights organizations. The employees were concerned that Google e was becoming
embroiled in work used for lethal purposes and other human rights concerns. CBP project uses
artificial intelligence deployed by the CBP Innovation Team, known as INVNT. INVNT built
"virtual" wall technology along the southern border that integrates surveillance towers and


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drones, blanketing a zone with sensors to detect unauthorized entry into the country. The
employee assumes the company will be involved in the military zone, not part of their company
culture.

In line with an employee allegation, the Regional Director of the U.S. National Labor
Relations Council (NLRB) alleges Google retaliated against activists. Google was allegedly
interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of their rights guaranteed in
Section 7 of the National Labour Relations Act. (Board, 2020) Google wrecked the law by
terminating and questioning employees due to their activism practice, enforcing other rules in a
discriminatory manner, and maintaining rules restricting legally protected organizing.

NLRB explicitly accuses Google of illegally; spying on employees, firing several

employees in retaliation for attempting to unionize, and illegally blocking employees from
sharing work grievances and information using available tools such as; calendars, email, meeting
rooms, and an internal communication device at Google.

Besides, the death knell for Google's open culture started when TGIF meetings, weekly
all-company gatherings, and one of Google's most time-honored traditions are being scaled back
TGIF to once a month, rather than once a week or biweekly. Management made the gatherings
less frequent because of a "coordinated effort" to leak comments made at the internal meetings.
Instead of being open forums and sounding boards, TGIFs will now be more product-focused, so
workers should limit their discussion to "product and business strategy."

Google seems to change its view of employee activists, now that they see them as a threat
rather than as their asset. Google releases the new community guidelines where Google tried to
discourage employees from talking about politics and debate about the politics or improper
disclosure of its information. Google mentioned that the new community guidelines as a way to
hinder doxing and employee harassment. Unlike the company, employees have reported that the
guidelines have silenced them not to criticize the management.

After 20 years of maintaining an open culture, Google will not be able to restrict its
employees' abilities to investigate and question its executives' decisions without a fight from its
rank-and-file. Google built through transparency and accountability, not intimidation and
retaliation.

The reports of violations against the dismissal of Google employees continue. Google
management or fired employees will conduct a hearing on April 21, 2021; Both sides can call
bystanders and present evidence to bear their case. After the administrative law judge gives a
recommendation, each side will have the option to appeal the decision and settle the matter at
any time. However, both parties expected to apply management conflict by negotiating, which
will provide a satisfactory settlement for both parties.

2. Case Issues related organizational behavior topic

2.1 Power and influence in the Workplace

In 2019, Google has eliminated the opportunity for employees to question management
regarding ethical concerns and introduced some new rules to limit the employee’s accessibility to
view many of the company documents and the documents is allow to be accessed by employees
previously. According to the employees, these new rules just want to limit the acceptable speech
of employees on internal forums. This will indirectly limit the open culture that consists in
Google previously as employees can have a constant inspection regarding to the management
decisions. Therefore, the attempt of the Google management team to silence employees to give
feedback on the management team’s decision and Google has further put out a growing base of
internal activists by suspending the two employees are the reasons that caused the protest by 200
employees in November 2019.

In this case, the management team of Google uses the coercive power to apply the
punishment on the two employees due to their activism in maintaining rules restricting legally
protected organizing, and enforcing other rules in a discriminatory manner. They force the two
employees who are Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland to leave the company without
discussing how to solve the problem at first. According to Rebecca Rivers, Google points out she
accessed directly the documents that are about the guidelines on how to take down the message
boards internal content of Google. Nevertheless, some employees explained that this is not an
improper ethics by checking the calendars of the employee at Google as this action will not make
other employees feel unsafe.

So, the coercive power used by Google to control employee’s behavior, in this case, will
bring more disadvantages to the company such as decrease the job satisfaction of employees due
to the low, transparent policy introduced to control the activities of employees. (Fareed, 2015)

2.2 Ethical Values and Behavior

Google "attempts to silence workers" is against one of the ethical principles: individual
rights. The individual-rights principle extends beyond the legal right of human rights that
everyone granted as society's moral norm (Steven & Mary Ann, 2018).

Individual right principle is the principle that states that everyone has the same set of
natural rights, as well as; freedom of speech and movement, physical security, and fair trial.
Therefore, the new rules introduced by Google might be too extensive to protect the company's
policy with control and monitor the employees' activities with an internal tracking tool that was
developed by Google. This is because the developed tracking tool can be triggered automatically
if any of the employees has create any large meetings. This action not only against ethical
principles but also the law mentioned in Section 7 of the National Labour Relations Act, which
allows employees to attend meetings to discuss forming a union with co-workers.

The company should make sure that the employees' right is reserved before introducing
any rules to protect the company's privacy because according to (Steven & Mary Ann, 2018)
ethical conduct is influenced by the situational factor in which the conduct occurs.

2.3 Conflict and Negotiation in the workplace

Conflict is the process in which one party thinks that his or her interests are being
negatively affected or opposed by another party (Steven & Mary Ann, 2018). There are either
positive or negative consequences from the conflict in an organization, but the consequences of
conflict in this issue is a negative consequence or is a bad conflict.

Google management generated the negative consequence of this conflict by giving the
employee suspension to “attempt to silence workers”. Therefore, a negotiation process is a
necessary or one of the effective processes to resolve the conflict between Google and the
employees.

The source of conflict that appears, in this case, occurs from the differentiation of the
company and employee preferences. The occurrence of this employee protest is due to the moral
concerns about Google’s work with US immigration agencies. Nevertheless, rather than reducing
the differentiation by resolving their disputes through constructive discussion, the bosses attempt
to stop workers from discussing workplace issues by introducing new guidelines in the
workplace.

The negotiation process is a complex human interaction that is related to the attitudes,
motivation, decision making, and communication. The most important negotiation skills which
are to gather information, manage concessions, manage time, and build the relationship should

be practiced by employees to discuss with the company to resolve the conflict. Therefore, the
employees in Google need to practice a way that can estimate their negotiation power with the
management team so that concessions of both parties can be achieved and solve the problems.

2.4 Interpersonal Conflict-Handling Style

Internal conflicts between Google and its employees over the past three years have
caused complex issues due to a conflict of management interest and political interference related
to the project with the US government. For this particular case, the conflict-handling style that is
suitable to overcome the problem is practicing problem-solving. Problem-solving has a high
assertiveness and cooperativeness, a win-win orientation to solve the problems by sharing the
information and ideas from different parties.

Google needs to discuss with the employees and find a beneficial solution for both parties
in solving this issue. Instead, Google is more oriented to avoiding, which is low assertiveness
and cooperativeness. Google is steering clear of the employees associated with the conflict.
Google minimizes the discussion of the sensitive topic when interacting with the employees.

2.5 Organizational Culture

Organizational culture consists of the assumptions and values shared within an
organization (Steven & Mary Ann, 2018). According to that, Google founders have a great value
on transparency and openness that was built into the company’s systems as well as its culture.
Employees is open and have a right to view the internal documents with only informal rules that
limit the types of sensitive information employee could access. Besides that, the collaboration
tools that introduced by the founder enabled employees to share their opinion and views with
each other. However, Google has been putting efforts to establish and enforce stricter guidelines
around what employees can say at work after the rise of employee activism in year 2019.

Culture is an adaptive culture that embraces change, creativity, open-mindedness, growth,

and learning. However, what google management has done makes employees not receptive to
this change, including the organization's ongoing alignment to its environment and continuous
advancement of internal processes.

Google should produce a strong culture regarding the privacy policy with the employees
because, with that culture, the company will produce an excellent organizational outcome, which

includes increasing the organizational performance as well as improving the employee well-
being.

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3. Analysis

In order to analyze the methods used by Google in handling their employees that cause protest in
the year 2019 is effective or not, we will implement SWOT analysis to measure the effectiveness.

3.1 Strength
Google management keeps their employees silent to remain a good image in front of the
public. Google attempted to silence their workers by putting Berland and Rivers on
administrative leave for violating company policy but in fact, to stop them from spreading
information about internal issues because Google claimed that they were creating rumors. By
doing so, Google was able to stop Rivers and Berland from spreading more information about
internal issues to the public. When the public does not know about how Google handles their
workplace, the public will never think that Google had actually offended the workplace
regulation and custom.

Google management also uses coercive power to give managers and supervisors the
control over the way of an organization. This brings benefits to the company because if
employees continue to refuse to follow company policies or standards, managers have the
authority to correct them to develop discipline among employees which improves efficiency and
productivity in the workplace (Quain. S, 2019). Also, coercive power usually able to help
prevent or eliminate harassment and discrimination in the workplace such as force to correct a
violation of employee conduct

Google started a "need-to-know" policy for viewing many company documents to allow
employees to only view the documents that are related to them instead of previously able access
more widely. This is a good way to increase company data security by controlling or restricting
employee access to certain data. As we know that when most of the people are able to access that
data, the more insecure, it will be.

3.2 Weakness
Google forcing their employees to keep silent will cause employees to dislike the
company culture. Everyone has an equal right to voice out their opinion in the workplace. When
management forces employees to remain silent, employees are unable to provide suggestions or

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feedback to the management, and this is actually a bad culture for a company because feedback
and suggestions might be helpful for improvement. As we know, people in this generation
usually will choose to work in a place that they like instead of forcing themselves to work in an
unhappy environment. Hence, this will cause a high turnover in the company.

Moreover, Google forcing employees to keep silent will cause employees to lose their
interest in the company. This is because employees will not feel a sense of belonging in the
company. An organization that is open to receive feedback and suggestions from employees
allow employees to feel they are part of this company. At the same time, the feedback and
suggestions from employees might help the company in future development.

Google forcing employees to keep silent is actually controlling the freedom of the
employees. Employees nowadays are looking for freedom of speech which means they need to
have the freedom to voice out their opinion in the organization or even in front of the public.
Hence, when companies stop them from giving their opinion, they might feel that there is
something hiding from them. If an organization is transparent enough, they will not force their
employees to keep silent. When things are getting serious, employees will even protest in front
of the public to create public attention.

3.3 Opportunity
Google is able to expand their market and attract more users to use their service. The
right way to expand the market is managing a good company image. Good company image is
important for Google to win public trust easily and gain confidence from the public. Many of the
consumers today will consider the environmental and social image of the firms while making
their purchasing decisions (Corporate Image - benefits, Importance of corporate image, Theory
of corporate image, 2021). Hence, Google's company image is relatively important to compete
with the market because consumers will only support Google's product if or only Google has a
good image. This allows consumers to feel confidence and trust in their company and decide to
support their product.

Google management is able to manage their internal departments systematically and

efficiently. Google being able to take control of the company by using coercive power actually
brings opportunities to the company as they can manage their organization systematically and
efficiently because most of the time decisions were made by managing level. It is very

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straightforward and time-saving when management makes all the decisions and employees just
execute the decision. Besides, coercive power management style will produce more disciplined
employees as most of the employees are very motivated else they will be fired or demoted if they
did not perform well. Hence, a good quality employee is able to let Google perform their
business well and be ready to lead the market.

Google is able to prevent their advance and unique technology being copied by others
and be the best search engine in the world. In order to achieve that, Google has to tighten their
company policies to control the access of their company data to provide more security to their
data. This action is also to prevent company details being leaked out to third parties that may
copy company ideas and planning. Secure data protection system allows Google to keep ahead
from competitors and competition because front ranked manufacturers always build their system
with security in mind.

3.4 Threats
Google threat was their employee turnover rate might be high due to the organizational
culture. Google enforces stricter guidelines around what employees can say at work and also stop
having its famous weekly "TGIF" all-hands meetings and even built an internal tracking tool to
track their employee's activities. Employees will feel uncomfortable with Google action as they
will feel the company did not provide them with freedom or did not trust them. Hence, the
turnover rate will be high in the company when an employee is unable to accept the culture. The
high turnover rate in a company is not a good sign because it indirectly means that there are
many internal issues to be solved and the effectiveness of the work progress will decrease and
affect the profit of the organization.

Google employee's protest will affect their company reputation and indirectly might
affect the company profits. When Google tried to keep their employee silent and put Rivers and
Berland on administrative leave, most of the employees disagreed with their way of handling this
case and protested in front of Google in Sans Francisco. This action not only attracted public
attention, but it also attracted media attention and was published to the world. This eventually
affected their company image and reputation because everyone knows how Google treats their
employees and started to judge and give comments on Google. Google's image being affected

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will affect shareholder decisions and cause consumers to choose other competitors services that
are similar to Google services.

4. Recommendation

The changing of organizational culture in Google occurred after co-founders Larry Page,
and Sergey Brin would be stepping aside as Google leaders. The new leaders of Google attempt
to change the culture rather than strengthen the founders' culture. He converts the company
"open culture" by changing many of the rules and policies such as overlooking employee privacy
policy, replacing new community guidelines, eliminating weekly all-hands meetings, and
applying internal tracking tools. Related to that, alter that culture was not an effort to protect the
company but more to protect Google management's interests.

Refer to the strategies to changing organizational culture (p525, Steven & Mary Ann,
2018), these are the following recommendation that should Google management applied to
overcome the conflict with the employees:

Align artifacts with the desired culture.

Google needs to relate with the memorable culture as the "happiest company in tech" that
refers to their open culture that puts forward transparency promoted by the founder Page and
Brin. In order to solve the conflict between Google's management team and their employees,
Google should restore the open culture in their company. By practicing that in an organization
allows employees and superior to communicate honestly and openly with each other and
cultivates a culture where information can flow freely between people and teams (Balmer, 1994).
Besides that, practicing transparency also prevents their team from putting assumptions on each
other like what happens in Google.

Introduce culturally consistent rewards/recognition.

Google should focus on a specific performance goal to enhance strong ties with the
culture. It is crucial to strengthen their current culture, an open culture that has succeeded in
bringing glory in the past. Because, applying the coercive power to introduce culture, only
creates an employee protest and negative company image.

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Support workforce stability and communication.

Google should create a comfortable working environment by giving the employee space
by interacting and communicating with others in the workplace. It means by it is essential to
return the TGIF schedule and the purpose of the event, which is a professed belief in a
transparent corporate culture, and the moment when employees have a chance to talk with
management about plans for the future. So it is not as related to the company product discussion.
Besides, the company also needs to cancel the implementation of the new community guidelines,
which consist of various internal communication restrictions to promote stability in the
workplace.

Use attraction, selection, and socialization for culture "fit."

Google should also practice the ASA theory (Attraction-Selection-Attrition) to attract,
select, and retain people with its character, generating a more homogeneous organization and a
more robust culture to minimize the conflict. It means to protect an open-culture, either
employee or management should be appointed based on the similarity of values and assumptions
towards the corporate culture.

Actions of founders and leaders.

Google's founder and leader should inspire the employee to maintain the shared values
and assumptions that the company has, and they need to be more adaptive to the culture that
exists within the company. According to the conflict between management teams and employees,
companies need to solve by negotiating with the fired employees by using the Bargaining Zone
Model. (Steven & Mary Ann, 2018) Both parties should reach their resistance point so that the
potential agreement can be achieved. Although the target point which is the realistic goal of both
parties are different, alternative strategies must be considered in to solve the problems.

The employees also need to determine their power by using BATNA so that the
employees can estimate their power in the negotiation with the company. Both parties should go
through the negotiation process to discuss the issue. If the employees are still fired after
negotiation, they may need to accept the truth and find another way if they are still not convinced
with the result. However, at least Google has gone through the negotiation process and used
problem solving to try to resolve the conflict between the company and the employees.

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The management team in Google can use the bicultural audit to diagnose cultural
relations between the companies with the employees and determine the extent to which cultural
clashes will likely occur. This may be used for merging different companies, but it may be useful
to merge the internal organizational cultures to reduce the conflict between management team
and the employees in an organization.

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5. Conclusions

In a nutshell, every organization has their own style or way to manage their organization.
In this study we are able to learn about how Google manages their organization and how is their
organization behavior. We were able to find out several issues that caused Google employees to
protest in front of Google Headquarters in San Francisco. Such as, power and influence in the
Workplace, ethical values and behavior, conflict and negotiation in the workplace, interpersonal
conflict-handling styles, and organization culture. All those issues are actually related to our
studies and can be linked to our workplace.

Although there are issues that cause the protest, we can still analyze the way that Google
handles their employees by using SWOT analysis. Even though the way Google handles their
employees creates discussion and protest among the public and employees, we are still able to
observe the strength, weakness, opportunities and threat in the method of their decision in this
case.

People always say “To win a market place you must first win the workplace”. Internal
department of the organization plays an important role in producing quality products and
services to the consumer. While employees are one of the most important roles in producing
quality products and services. By producing quality products and services, we can only meet the
market requirement and compete in the market. Hence, Google should take this experience
seriously and make a better change in order to manage their workplace well and get ready to
compete with the market.

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