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Week 8 Assignment 2: Integrating Culture and Diversity in Decision Making
Michael Haidar
Strayer University
Professor Ronald Jones
BUS 520 Leadership and Organizational Behavior
November 30, 2014

Google, the most widely used web-based search engine, was founded in 1998 by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergei Brin. As a research project in 1996, Page and Brin began developing a search engine designed to look at the connecting links between web pages in order to determine a site’s authority. In 1998, Page and Brin set up their first data center in Page’s dorm. With the encouragement of fellow Stanford alum David Filo, who started Yahoo a few years earlier, page and Brin decided to start a company and started looking for investors to back them. Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested $100,000 in the company after receiving a demo of their search technology. The pair eventually raised over $1M (Anto, 2002, p. 188).
Every organization has its own culture. Since many employees spend 40 or more hours at their workplace, their organization’s culture obviously affects both their work lives as well as their personal lives. Organizational culture is defined the system of shared actions, values, and beliefs that develops within an organization and guides the behavior of its members. Although each organization has its own unique culture, there are some common cultural elements that yield stability and meaning for organizations (Schermerhorn, Osborn, & Hunt, 2012, p. 348).
Cultural differences can be attributed to a number of factors, including: (1) Education, which may be a source of conflict in some workplace issues when there's disagreement about theory versus practice in achieving organizational

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