Jeff Cary

OGL 481

Situational Structure

The situation I choose for this assignment is the arrest of two African American men in a

Philadelphia Starbucks location. Both men were arrested and removed from the store by police

as an act of discrimination by the store manager for them loitering. The two gentlemen were

waiting for another peer to meet them at the store to discuss a business deal, but because they

had not yet made a purchase the store manager called the police. At the time I was working for

Starbucks as a district manager about 2 hours from where the incident had taken place.

From my point of view there were issues in the structure of the organization with a lack

of clarity in pockets of the country and this shined a light on the situation. A main point that

really illustrates this from the learning material is” If key responsibilities are not clearly

assigned, important tasks fall through the cracks.” (2017) There had been local policies enacted

due to a lack of an overall policy for dealing with loitering and customers not purchasing

products and using the cafes. While I do not think these decisions came from a racist or

malicious place, I think they were not the best decisions of how to handle situations like this

that come up. Being spread too thin at upper management levels with some district managers

covering 25 stores or more and regional directors having 9 or 10 districts within their area

forced districts and regions to create specific policies and plans for the stores.
 Had Starbucks been less divisionalized then there could have been a better

understanding of the issues these stores were facing and policies in place to handle them. Had

a district manager not made the decisions to remove everyone in the store that was not

purchasing then this issue would not have happened and caused an outbreak. Changing the

structure and adding additional district managers and regional directors could allow a more

collaborative environment for the teams dealing with homeless populations in bigger cities.

Thinking through this and how I could change now knowing what I know about structure

causing this issue with the situation, there is not much I would have been able to change. Not

being in the affected area I was not directly dealing with the issues that had come up so I can

only speak about how I feel I would handle this. I would have pushed for a policy to have been

implemented one I realized that dealing with homeless people causing disturbances in my

stores. I would not take no for an answer and continue to drive the issue up the chain of

command to ensure that my teams were able to deal with these interactions.
 Reference or References

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing Organizations. In Reframing organizations

artistry, choice, and leadership 6th ED (p. 74). Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass.