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.

To restate my situation from Module 1, I was a store manager working for Starbucks in a
remote area. My state was in the middle of experiencing an oil boom, and the company
decided to open up a fourth store in the city where I live. My role was to help hire and
train for the new store. While the oil boom was great for sales, it also created a lot of
other issue was well. It drove unemployment rates down, but it also drove the cost of
living up. This, in turn, created pressure for businesses to keep increasing their starting
wages in order to stay competitive and maintain staff, especially in the retail industry.
And, Starbucks was not doing a good job of keeping up with the demand of wage
increases that were unique to this oil boom. This, along with some turnover in
management that left the new store without someone to run it, really put all the stores into
a staffing crisis. The end results were four very understaffed, very busy stores, which
was very stressful for everyone that worked in them.

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

I definitely think the structure of the organization influenced the situation. Opening new
store locations is not something new for Starbucks. They have done it many times
before, and, in fact, they even have a new store opening packet that serves as a guideline
for how the store manager and district manager should navigate through opening the
store. The packet itself is a form of structure, and it is used to create consistency in how
new stores open. It also creates a timeline for when you should start ordering inventory,
hiring and training staff, and setting up delivery services.

Starbucks also has a specific pay structure in place that they use to determine how much
they pay their employees. The pay range that someone is offered is determined by a
number of variables. They may include things like what city or state you live in, what
position you are applying for, your tenure with the company, what experience you bring

1
 to the table, and whether or not you are an internal or external hire. All of these things
could affect your pay. Their starting wage amount and benefits package are also big
components of their pay structure, and many variables go into calculating those as well.

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

I am a person who responds well to some form structure in the workplace. I really like
the role clarity that structure brings. So, I actually appreciate the different levels of
structure that Starbucks offers as a company. Given the size of the company, its
organizational structure is obviously very complex. But, if I were to recommend an
alternative course of action regarding my case, I would have liked to have seen the
company be a little less rigid in the structures I discussed, especially given the extreme
circumstances that the oil boom was creating. I think it is important for a company to
have a plan to stay flexible, even within rigid structure, because there are always going to
be outlier situations that happen, which you could never plan for, just as our project
management classes have taught us. Modern times are adapting to that though, and
“recent years have witnessed remarkable inventiveness in designing structures
emphasizing flexibility” (Bolman & Deal, 2017, p. 53).

First, I believe that the structure around how Starbucks determines the opening of a new
store, should take extreme situations like this into a closer review. The oil boom
tremendously increased sales in all of the stores around the state, and as for the company,
they wanted to capitalize on those sales. But they failed to take into account the staffing
crisis that was occurring, due to competitive starting wages, created by the low
unemployment rate across the state. And, more importantly, they didn’t recognize the
stress that it was causing the employees that worked in those stores. They were too slow
to respond, and they did not have a structure in place to adjust to extreme circumstances
like this. They kept falling back on the rigid calculations of their pay structure as
justification, when they should have acted quicker to resolve the issue.

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

Starbucks is a company that is based on a management structure of hierarchy. All of the

baristas have a store manager they report to, and all of the store managers report to a
district manager. The district manager reports to a regional director, and the regional
director reports to a regional vice president, and so on and so forth. So, when there are
concerns, there is a chain of command that you follow to voice those concerns, starting
with the person above you in the hierarchy. After reflecting on what I would do
differently, given what I have learned, I would have challenged that hierarchy a lot more.

I have been with the company for 16 years, and I have never experienced anything as
stressful as the hiring crisis that the oil boom created. People working in retail were
2
 literally jumping from job to job, depending on how much they paid. Even the fast-food
restaurant across the street from me was hiring people for $2.00 more an hour than I
could offer. When I went to my district manager with this concern, I know it got elevated
up the chain of command, but because Starbucks did not have a structure in place to
adjust to this extreme circumstance, the responses kept falling back on the old way of
determining starting wages. Looking back, I wish I would have had the courage to break
the structural hierarchy, go above my chain of command to voice my concerns, and then
above that again if I didn’t get the results I wanted. By the time the company recognized
this situation may be an outlier to their normal pay structure, it had already been multiple
years of stress on the managers and baristas in the market.

3
 Reference

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing  organizations: Artistry, choice, and

leadership (6th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass