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 your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.
1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.
The situation that happened within my organization Starbucks was that our store manager was
giving a lot of favoritism. She was going to a lot of the baristas and allowing them to talk poorly
about the store's shift supervisors. She let certain people get away with things she would write up
the others for. She would gossip about partners about other partners. During this time some of
the team had written down these instances and reported her to our ethics and compliance team at
Starbucks which launched an investigation at our store. I was part of the team who helped write
the report and take notes on what was going on within our store.
2) Describe how the structure of the organization influenced the situation.
The structure within Starbucks is a machine bureaucracy. This is described in our textbook as,
“members of the strategic apex make the big decisions. Managers and standardized procedures
govern day-to-day operations (Bolman, Deal).” Starbucks is run by this as well. The big choices
like new drinks, or prices and things are all set up by corporate. And the smaller choices such as,
whom to send to run the trash, whom to put on to the drive-thru, and so on are all set by
managers in the individual stores. Our days are run structurally the same with systems that can
be robotic, hence the machine part.
The situation was for sure apparent because our store manager does make the hiring decisions. In
order to be hired at Starbucks, you interview the store manager and they decide if they want to
hire you. You could tell that most of the people she was giving favoritism to were the people she
hired and not the previous managers' staff. I think that this really influenced her to want the
success of the team she was building to do well. She also had the choice to promote people
within the store, which she would give out promotions to newer baristas that she hired instead of
the tenured baristas who might have been the better choice for the store to pick. Disciplinary
actions are also taken by the store manager so when she did not like someone, she would give
them write-ups. However, the not favorite people could do the same thing like being late to work
or calling in and getting written up for it. It should have been the same consequence for everyone
who did that.
3) Recommend how you would use the structure for an alternative course of action
regarding your case.
When it really comes down to it we want our team to work together to answer the questions in
our book including, “who do we coordinate efforts” and “what are the special skills and talents
of each group member (Bolman, Deal).” And I think a lot of this comes out in the hiring process.
In the hiring process, we want to make sure that the person we are adding to our team is special

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and fits into the culture of the company. I do not know if the only person who has a say should
be just the store manager. I think that during interviews, another person should be able to sit in
on the conversation. A shift supervisor is in charge of running the floor most, if not all of the
time and they also help train new people why are they not allowed to be in on the hiring of new
people?
I think this solution would help with creating a well-rounded culture at our store. I think that with
the conversation of how people work who are actually with the team all of the time makes it so
that the picks are better for the store. It also allows shift supervisors to have the opportunity to
learn what it is like to be a store manager and helps create that mentoring relationship with each
other.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about this frame.
Learning more about this frame I think that structure is really important. Making sure that the
team has people they can talk to and feel comfortable with everyone is super important. I think
that ideally I would want our store to be a circle network. “It creates multiple connnections so
that everyone can talk to anyone else. Information flows freely (Bolman, Deal).” I think that one
of the things that make it hard is that our team is very focused on who the boss is. All of us have
our store manager as a boss, but baristas have shift supervisors as their boss as well. It seems like
they do not get as much respect, in the favoristim part of the situation our boss was yelling at the
shift supervisors for telling people what to do when it is their job to do that. I think that if people
were seen to be on the same level it would have been a much better situation.

I think that if we had a better structure for our teams that I would not have had to report the store

manager. If she saw the shift supervisors as bosses and not beneath her then it might have been a

better situation. I would feel more comfortable knowing that I was supported by more people

than just one as a barista and as a shift supervisor.

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 References

Deal, T. E., & Bolman, L. G. (2017). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership.

Wiley.