OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Political Frame Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the political frame
2. Apply the political 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.

View, a dynamic glass company, ran into legal with the SEC after it was discovered that
warranty accurals were misstated. This was discovered during a merger and as a result
led to fines and even criminal presecution against the Chief Financial Officer. The
warranty accurals were misstated as a result of defective product being released into the
field and the costs associated were not documented properly. As a project engineer for
View, my only responsibility was to identify, document, and manage the replacement of
the defective products. I had no direct involvement in the warranty accrual misstatement,
but wanted to investigate how this issue may have arised throught the different frames.

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

View has a board of directors which control decisions and the future of the company.
There are politics in place when there are multiple seats available, each seat attempting to
persuade the highest ranking chair (CEO). The CEO has been at the chair of the board
since the inception of the company, so his power derives from his tenure as one of the
founding members. This issue may have been created from the looming pressure of the
companies financial situation.

The CFO, who did not sit on the board, may have been feeling the political pressure from
the board and the CEO to show that the company was on its way to gross-margin positive
and have a good financial standing before the merger took place.

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

In order to avoid future issues with the SEC, I’d likely seek to rearrange the board
members and remove the CEO from the board of directors. They simply held too much
power and placed pressure on the company to cut corners. We’d need to find a way to

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 have better financials through the merger. If I were the new CEO, I’d ensure to enter the
company with a specific agenda: take the company to gross-margin positive while
maintaining ethical business practices and fair trade. The effective leader creates an
“agenda for change” with two major elements: a vision balancing the longer-term
interstes of key parties, and a stragey for achieving the cision while recognizing
competing internal and external forces (Kotter, 1988, as cited in Bolmen and Deal, 2021).

The vision I’d create to garnish change would be a company that is leading the way in a
revolutionary product and is the clear market leader. The strategy I would implement
would be to hire a new team of C-suite executives, ideally from within the company to
smooth the transition and have familiar faces on top.

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

I believe the company should take a good hard look at how politics affected its course of
action. Before the merger, and even before the misstatement, a remapping of the political
terrain could have helped identify where there were possible issues within the c-suite
executives. Using the two-dimensional diagram from Bolman and Deal, we can identify
who was in the game and how much power each wielded. Our players are the CEO, the
CFO, the merging company, and the shareholders. Each of them want to take the
company to gross-margin positive, but how to get there was obscure.

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 Reference

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2021). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership
(7th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Press release. SEC Emblem. (2023, July 3). https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-126