OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Political Frame Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the political frame
2. Apply the political 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 work for Starbucks as a supervisor and have been with the company for five years.
When Starbucks wanted to give their supervisors more autonomy over their managerial
roles, my manager put me in charge of beverage standards and routines. There was a 4-
hour long training session at a store in another location to ensure all supervisors had the
correct knowledge to train and coach the baristas in our stores. I came back to my store
hoping to retrain my baristas on a few beverage standards and routines, but my manager
told the baristas I was incorrect and then trained them incorrectly. Later, the store
manager and assistant manager held a meeting with all the supervisors to discuss
everyone’s role and to ensure everyone was on the same page about our goals.
Confronting my manager about the standard, my manager told me I was wrong again.
Frustration led me to raise my voice and say I did not want to oversee beverage standards
and routines if she was going to undermine me. My manager was offended until the
assistant manager told the manager she was incorrect, and I was correct about the
standard.

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

Starbucks political system is a top-down system. Being a multibillion-dollar corporation,

Starbucks uses their political power to keep their stockholders and higher ups happy
while keeping their power over their customer base as well. The customer base may think
they have power over Starbucks as a company, but they do not change much of anything
about Starbucks as an organization. This political power and top-down system influenced
my situation because Starbucks board makes standards and policies which every store
must abide by. However, these standards and policies can be vague and interpreted many
different ways which can confuse management and baristas. My manager who has power
over me believed she was reading the standard correctly, and she always follows the
standards and policies as they are stated. In this case, she was reading the standard
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 incorrectly. My political power is not high in Starbucks, so my assistant manager decided
to solve this problem by correcting my manager because he has more authority than I do
to challenge my manager. This is because Starbucks is an overbounded system where
power is highly concentrated to upper management and everything is tightly controlled
(Bolman & Deal, 2021). There are employees who do not follow the standards and
policies set forth by the board, but they do not have power to change these standards and
policies. I do not have the power to change the standards or policies, but I can try to
influence my manager who can bring up challenges to those above her because she holds
more power than me.

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

My manager tends to hold all the power in our store. I would like to use organizational
politics to give supervisors and baristas more power to be able to challenge or influence
management. Networking and building coalitions and bargaining and negotiation would
be the political skills I would utilize to increase our political power (Bolman & Deal,
2021). For networking, I would become closer with my district manager as well as
managers from other stores who can help me have more political power. Building a
coalition would not be too difficult in my store because we all have close relationships to
begin with. Having more people supporting me would give me good power to influence
my manager. For bargaining and negotiation, I would utilize the strategies from Fisher
and Ury such as focusing on interests, not positions as well as insisting on objective
criteria (Bolman & Deal, 2021). My manager and I could sit down and review the
beverage resource manual which was the manual used in my training session for my role
on standards and routines. Then, we would have the same interests of bettering our
employees instead of focusing on who is correct based on our positions in the company.
We could focus on objective criteria by creating a plan on specific standards or routines
we can collectively as a store improve upon.

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

The political frame from Bolman and Deal taught me more in-depth about political power
and the pros and cons to this process. Gaining more political power is possible but
difficult in a top-down system. The ecosystems between corporations, society, and
governments are heavily dependent on the power each has over the other (Bolman &
Deal, 2021). The corporation I work for is very tightly controlled, and they have a lot of
political power over society. The government controls much of Starbucks, society and
Starbucks are embedded in their political relationship with each other, and I have the
smallest amount of political power in this situation. The discussion about grassroots
groups empowered me to feel as though I do have power to change my manager’s

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 perspective or influence my organization. In this situation, I would make my voice heard
even more. I only stated one problem which was on my mind and did not fully support
myself with evidence. I should have held my ground and stood up for myself because I
knew I was right and knew I had the power in this situation because I had been trained on
these standards recently when my manager had not.

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 Reference
Bolman, L. G. & Deal, T. E. (2021). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership
(7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass