Facebook’s Organizational Culture and Structure

Published in

An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)

4 min readSep 17, 2020

According to some “Influence does not mean Popularity” but it’s sure as hell been the case of Facebook judging by how they have managed to master both crafts and merged it to generate limitless streams of revenue. It would be important to take a closer look at their structure and ethos.

Facebook, Inc. is an American social media conglomerate corporation based in Menlo Park, California. It is considered one of the Big Five technology companies along with Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google. Facebook, with 2.2 billion monthly active users, is the largest social media site of all time. This young company, founded in 2004, leverages their network to sell advertising and has cemented its role as Google’s counterpart in the digital advertising “duopoly.”

Facebook owns and operates 9 companies in addition to Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland Ltd, namely: Instagram, WhatsApp, Atlas, Oculus, Masquerade, Onavo, Moves, CrowdTangle & Facebook Payments.

Key Leadership

Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer/ Chairman/ Founder
Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer/ Director

Edurado Saverin, Co-Founder
David Wehner, Chief Financial Officer
Mike Schreopfer, Chief Technology Officer
Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer

Mission Statement

Facebook’s corporate mission is “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” This new mission statement was implemented amid data privacy and security issues involving Cambridge Analytica and other parties.

The following are the main components of Facebook’s mission statement:

1. Empowering people

2. Enabling community building

3. Connecting the world

Vision Statement

Facebook’s corporate vision statement is “People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.”

The following represent the main components of Facebook’s vision statement:

1. Global market scope

2. Tool for communication

3. Tool for discovery

4. Tool for self-expression

Facebook’s Organizational Culture

The company applies its organizational culture as a tool for supporting business resilience and competitiveness. Facebook Inc. develops its human resources with the hacker organizational culture in mind. For example, through continuous improvement and iteration in the “hacker way,” the company supports social media and online advertising service enhancement. Also, Facebook Inc.’s organizational structure affects the company’s workforce development. Human resources are developed and maintained through training that ensures talent and skills for the company’s aims in creativity and innovation for its social media business. The following characteristics are the most notable in Facebook’s organizational culture:

1. Creative problem solving and decision-making: This corporate cultural characteristic pertains to the ability of employees to generate unusual ideas that enhance the company’s social networking and related offerings. Rewards are provided through recognition, incentives and other forms that motivate workers to be more creative in contributing to the business.

2. Boldness: This cultural feature aims to maximize the company’s flexibility in addressing business issues. For example, the corporate culture encourages workers to tackle issues right away, instead of waiting for such issues to escalate to senior management.

3. Openness: Openness significantly influences Facebook’s corporate culture. This cultural feature highlights the importance of effective and efficient internal communications. In addition, Facebook’s organizational culture facilitates openness in terms of minimizing restrictions on employees’ activities.

4. Speed: Facebook Inc. can easily respond to trends and changes in users’ preferences. This speed is a significant feature of Facebook’s organizational culture as the company believes that it is essential that its human resources rapidly react to new needs in the multinational market.

5. Continuous improvement: The company adheres to the principle that improvement is a never-ending process. This cultural feature encourages its small teams to continuously iterate products.

Facebook’s Organizational Structure

Facebook has a matrix organizational structure. The company’s organizational needs are addressed by the key characteristics of this structure, particularly the need for creativity and innovation. The following main features of Facebook’s corporate structure are notable:

1. Corporate Function-Based Teams

· Chief Executive

· Finance

· Operations

· Information

· Technology

· Accounting

· Privacy

· Security

· Marketing

· Legal

· Business & Marketing