OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Politcal 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 district manager. I manage a team of 12 store managers, and
upwards of 350 partners (employees). I had a store manager who was showing an
unconscious bias against men. She is an amazing store manager who was excelling in her
store but she never hired men, only interviewed a few but was always hiring women. I
had another store manager who had an unconscious hiring bias as well, except she
preferred to hire athletes. I noticed this trend with both of them and that it was beginning
to effect their stores. Manager one’s store was beginning to experience a lot of drama and
store two was running into conflict as well. After reflecting on the training for hiring that
our store managers goes through, I realized that the two store managers had never gone
through the unconscious bias training or diversity training being that they were older
parnters. I had all of my store managers go through it and we had a healthy conversation
about what it means to hire with out an unocncious bias and being mindful about creating
diverse teams and what the benefits are.

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

The politics of Starbucks are like most organizations. At my level in the organization I
didn’t see much of how the politics influenced my situation outside of needing to be
diverse. It is one of Starbucks values that we are a diverse company and that we do not
show bias either concious or unconscious.

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

I think an alternative course of action would be for the bias and unconcious bias training
to be mandatory and to be relevant to each role and how their bias impacts the company

1
 long term. Currently we just did the training once and it is a topic of concern but it does
not show up that it is a high level of concern.

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

Looking at the situation I would have probably looped in my regional manager and
partner resources manager into the situation sooner. I would have asked for help how to
better support my store managers in tackling their unconcious bias. A lot of push back I
ran into was that the managers didn’t see their bias and had a hard time coming to terms
with the fact that they had a bias even though they themselves were considered to be in a
minority group and are normally treated with bias themselves.