OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Structural Frame Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:

1. Describe the structural frame

2. Apply the structural frame to your personal case situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

The situation that I chose was the different events that led my manager to be released
with the Starbucks Coffee Company. My role within Starbucks and in the situation was
being a Shift Supervisor. As a Shift, you are considered to be the manager on duty, so
anything that happens during your shift is your responsibility, whether it pertains to the
customers, monies, or partners (Starbucks Employee).

2) Describe how the structure of the organization influenced the situation.

The structure of the organization influenced the situation by posting the guideline
of what it means to be a manager for an individual Corporate store. Starbucks provides
insight into what it means to be a Starbucks partner through the different lenses in job
positions. A field guide is provided to every partner that explains what approaches to
follow when speaking to customers and partners, as well as how to ensure that you are
able to deescalate any situation that arises. This field guide is available through our
company network, the Partner Hub. Within the Hub, you are able to access any
documents or links that will help you become a strong partner within the organization.

Starbucks provides a much more lenient process than most when it comes to
reporting situations that go against company policy. You get a large number of corrective
actions but only three write-ups before you are released with the company. This situation
created a majority of the problem, because our store manager consistently did different
actions that were minor in the eyes of Starbucks, so he mostly got corrective actions
rather than being written up.

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3) Recommend how you would use structure for an alternative course of action
regarding your case.

My plan for using structure for an alternative course of action include using the
field guide in a much different way. Following that field guide and the proper avenues as
soon as an incident occurs would be the best way for us to be able to get ahold of the
situation as a whole. We, as a team of Shift Supervisors, all approached our District
Manager individually rather than as a group. I feel that if we had approached as a group,
it would have had a much different outcome. In by approaching separately, we didn’t
provide a good timeline for the District Manager to see the problems as a whole.

Reporting the situations at a much later date also created issues because it was
difficult for the next level to be able to follow up on any thing that could have happened
because after a while, some details were lost that could have been important. Starbucks
provides a Partner Call Center that allows you to make anonymous ethics violation calls
and report them directly so that there can be an investigation into the situation. I feel that
my first alternate course of action would be to call the Call Center in hopes of filing a
report for reference in the future.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about this frame.

I feel that in this situation what I would have done differently is report it much
sooner than I originally did. A lot of the incidents began at the beginning of the year and
were not reported until the Summer time. I feel that as a Shift Supervisor, it was my
responsibility to pick up any slack that the store manager created. Once we got our new
Assistant Store Manager, it was apparent that we were doing far too much work that
caused far too much stress for the team of Shift Supervisors as well as the team of
Baristas. Before we even had the chance to fully understand the situationist was too late
and I feel like reporting it earlier would have made a difference in the timing of his
release.

Another thing that I would have done differently is the way I communicated with
the other partners. There were multiple instances that I kept what the manager did to
myself to protect him. He was a very lenient manager and would allow us to basically do
whatever we want even if it meant to disregard policy all together. He did not create a
thriving environment for his partners but created a far worse situation.