OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and the 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) Name and describe your organization.

The organization I will be studying is Starbucks Corporation. This is a very large,

international organization, whose mission is cited on its website as “With every cup, with
every conversation, with every community - we nurture the limitless possibility of human
connection” (Starbucks Corp., 2023). Due to its size, Starbucks has become a very
standardized place to work, and many times decisions come down to policy before
situational discretion. I will be looking specifically at the drive through location where I
have worked since 2019 and the district it is a part of in Campbell, California. This
location was built toward the end of 2018 and struggled with management issues and
getting off the ground, though I believe we currently have the best manager the location
has seen since its construction. Our district is run by a district manager, each store has its
own manager, some have assistant managers, then below them are shift supervisors and
regular baristas.

2) Describe your role in the organization (it can be an internal or external role).

I have been a shift supervisor at Starbucks since 2018, about six months before I started
working at this location. At the time, I was working on my development to become an
assistant store manager, and was one of the most tenured supervisors on our team. This
means that I was responsible for running individual shifts and breaks, coaching and
training baristas, and inventory management, as well as more managerial tasks related to
my development like training and coaching other supervisors and managing team
communications.

3) Describe the situation, including information you think will help the reader
understand the most important elements of the situation. (This will require
selectivity: part of the art of case writing is separating the essential facts from the
mass of information that might be included).

1
After almost a year of working at this location and struggling through inconsistent and
unfair management, our manager was removed and replaced with a manager from
another location. This period of transition is a great example of pushing through changing
an organization’s culture to create a better environment and improve the business. The
previous manager was more concerned with being friends with employees than actually
upholding standards or holding people accountable, so there was a huge amount of
tension and resistance when the new manager came in. Our scores on the corporate
success measurement scales were very low, the environment in the store was toxic, there
was a lot of gossip and throwing others under the bus, people were not used to being
expected to do their jobs to the letter, and on top of that they liked the previous manager
because she didn’t push them on any of these things, so they were already primed to
dislike the new one. However, she took the time to work shoulder to shoulder with her
employees for two months, getting to know them as people first, and seeing what they
were used to in their routines. She began giving people warnings that she would soon be
starting to hold everyone accountable to standards, and gave them sufficient time to get
accustomed to the idea and start transitioning to a new way of doing things. By the time
she was writing people up and cracking down on the rules, everyone liked (or at least
respected) her and she turned our store statistics around to be the top drive through in the
area in less than six months.