Andrew Mesa

OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Symbolic Frame Worksheet
Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the symbolic frame
2. Apply the symbolic 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.

I was given the task of creating a new branch of our company that would bring in interns
to increase the overall reach of the company sales. The interns bring in new sales from
solely making cold calls, and the real leads would be kept to the executive salesmen. My
role is to find and hire the interns, and train them to be better salesmen, have them
understand the inner-workings of the business, and potentially groom them so they gain
the knowledge and expertise needed to be promoted within the company.

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

The symbols in my organization can be seen as trying to increase the overall

competitiveness between employees. Being in sales creates a sense of selse discipline that
is needed in order to be successful. It is not the same as your average 9 to 5 job, because
if you show up and do the minimum you will make the same as long as you put in the
hours. However, in sales, and especially within my organization, we have leaderboards
posted every hour of who is progressing more deals and who can generate the most gross
margin per day. This sort of symbolism creates a strong sense competition, and it gets
everyone to work harder and harder.

This same symbolism is going to put into the ideology with the interns when they start,
because they will see these graphs of the senior salesman making up to $40,000 per
month and it will generate inspiration. They will want to do their job effectively to make
their own commission, and to hopefully get a promotion, and then to be able to start
closing deals themselves.

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

I do not think that I would use organizational symbol any differently, because of how
effective our executives have put them into place. Everything is open, and you can see an
estimate of how much salesmen are making. It not only inspires people to work harder to
be the highest earner, but it also keeps the lower-end of the spectrum accountable. If
someone is not working as hard as they should, it is extremely apparent, and can even be
embarrassing. It is important that all of this is done with respect and with no intention to
do harm, it is simply to create passion for trying to make more sales. If it ever turns into
something toxic, it can lead to a serious altercation with employees.

There could be a more effective way to generate excitement and dedication to making
more sales, and I think that there are a few ways to execute it. My company should
implement an incentive for being the top salesman for most gross margin, most sales, and
most hours in the office. I think these would apply to a lot of people, and it would create
an ever bigger sense of competition.
Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about this frame.
I mentioned before the importance of competition in the workplace, and I think that with
it comes a fire that ignites everyone to be more motivated. I would keep a lot of the
policies that we have, and the symbolisms we use in order to motivate the teams. I would
also add a team based system, where we group together interns and salesman, and then
see who can bring the most sales within the month. At the end of the month, I would like
to see the winning team is rewarded with a different prize each month.

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 Reference or References
(Choose appropriate Title if Applicable and Delete the Rest)