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

CONFIDENTIAL

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

My role is an Operations Supervisor in Bowlero Corp. It is an internal role and one that I
feel I can still have a full picture of the situation that occurred. The situation boils down to when
a party left a tip to the staff. He left a tip that was quite large to be split between the staff who
worked for the party. He left $100 to the server and bartender and then $50 each to the two
kitchen staff. I was not there for the discussion of how he was splitting the tip, that occurred with
my GM and the contact as there was a form that had to be filled out and I had not split a credit
card tip before. The bartender felt that she deserved all of the tips as she worked “the whole
party”. This was not the case as the cooks worked the party as well as Amber until Roxy scared
her off of the bar, which I was not there to see that day but was aware of the conflict between
them. Roxy also felt that I should be on her side when I was just being partial to what the contact
wanted. Roxy ended up walking out mid-shift and was angry with what happened.

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

The structure of the organization influenced the situation through customer,

employee, management, upper management, and then HR. The goals of the organization
are to provide not only a world class experience to guests, but also be there for employees
first. They were determined by Tom Shannon when he was forming the company. I
would like to think that most people agree what the important goals are however I can see
where there are those who are selfish in the organization. Roles are established through
promotions and heirarchy. In this situation, the employees were left to the decision of the
customer (stakeholder) and the managers were responsible for communicating between
the customer, employees, and HR. The customer had made a decision to leave a tip for
the staff, not a singular person. The managers responsibility was to take the proper form
to split the tip based off of what the customer thought was appropriate. The employees
were left to either take the tip or leave it, which Roxy the bartender left it. She still was
awarded the tip later after the situation was resvolved. There seemed to be a lot of ins and
outs for a simple situation like a tip, but the employee relationships made the situation
much bigger than expected.
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 3) Recommend how you would use structure for an alternative course of action
regarding your case.

For an alternate approach to the structure, I would have the customer get cash
back if we had the capability and tip each person what they thought was appropriate and
not do a credit card tip. This way the structure would remain in tact and there would be
some discretion in the way the tip was distributed. For the structure of heiarchy that was
established by Tom Shannon, I would not change the heiarchy, but focus more on the
development of the people within the heiarchy to really make it work.
The pyramid structure seems like it can be stable within powerhouses like the
military and most corporate businesses, so the focus should be on how to handle
situations like these professionaly when an employee feels they have been cheated out of
money. I thought the customer had distributed the tip appropriately however, the
bartender felt she deserved more. If we were not slammed and had the staff, I would have
been able to pull her aside to explain that she is not the only one who worked the party
and ask if there is anything else going on that is affecting her ability to see that.

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

Learning about the different ways internal and external relationships are managed within
an organization, I see the structure in this sitaiuton to be sound, but needs improvement
on professional or structural development of managers and employees. This situation
could have been avoided if the customer or manager had communicated with the staff
about the distributed tip, especially in an organizaiton where most tips are not shared
unless specified. Since this was not a normal thing, the bartender took this to a level of
offense that most people would be proud to share the accomplishment with their team. I
see it as everyone is struggling with money and to be respectful of the team as we were
all working at warp speed that shift. With more frequent communiation and training, a lot
of this could have been avoided, as I could tell the bartender had already build up
frustrations with our new GM.

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 Reference or References
Module 2 PCA Guiding Questions