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.

Organization Name: Starbucks Coffee Company

Description: Starbucks is a well-known organization and is made up of a lot of parts and

teams. It is overall well known as a chain of stores that sells coffee. Besides coffee, they have

whole bean coffee, tea, refreshers, and frappuccinos. The stores all sell the same things and

are set up in the same way. Starbucks has a retail side – the stores the public goes to and gets

coffee. As well as a corporate side that deals with the business, research and development,

ethics, and HR.

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

My role in the organization when I first started included working as a barista. This role

included making drinks, cash handling, and working with team members to accomplish

tasks. After that I became a shift supervisor which I am now, this includes the same tasks

as a barista but includes counting money for baristas, giving breaks and lunches, ordering

items for the store, handling customer issues, and delegating tasks for baristas to do.

During the time of this situation, I was also a fellow for Starbucks for the Global Coffee

Tea and Cocoa team. What I did on this team was essentially create a coffee selling

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 tracker sheet. This allowed the team to look at the sheet to see how many coffee sales

there were in different regions of the world for different years. I worked both in the store

and on the team on the corporate side.

3) Describe the situation, including information you think the 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).

The situation I would like to describe includes the up and downs of working on my

project of the sales tracker sheet. During this time, I had a lot of issues with my management. My

store manager did not enjoy the time that I was spending on my project and did not like that I had

to work less in the store in order to work on this project. I had 15 hours a week to work per my

fellowship guidelines. And I was a part-time employee of Starbucks. During this time we had a

hard time at our store going through transitions. At the beginning of my project, my store

manager had started a week before the official start date. During the duration of the project, there

was an issue of ethics going on in my store. My new store manager had started giving a lot of

favoritism to some of the employees and a lot of the store thought it was a bad thing for her to

do.

During this time I had filed a complaint against my store manager because she was giving

favoritism to other baristas and it was going against a lot of what the shift supervisors were

trying to do. For example, this barista that was getting favoritism would tell the store manager

that they were getting told to do more than other people, but instead of the store manager asking

the shift about the situation, they wrote them up without there being a conversation. There were

also times when I would delegate tasks to this barista and they would complain about me to the

store manager and they talked poorly about me as a person. There was eventually an

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investigation into my store and there were a lot of my fellow partners who did not want to speak

up since they were scared to lose their jobs or get backlash when it came to this issue. Now we

are back to my store manager having an improvement plan.

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