MT260 Unit 3 Role and Structure Paper Example

Three Jobs Nobody Was Hired to Do: A Unit 3 Role and Structure Paper on an Independent Bookstore

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Purdue University Global

MT260: Group and Organization Dynamics

Unit 3 Role and Structure Paper

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[Date]

The bookstore, its owner, staff and every event are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Store and Its Formal Structure

Hollis Street Books is a composite independent bookstore in a small city, with an owner, two shift leads and six booksellers. The formal structure is simple. The owner buys inventory, sets prices and handles the store's finances. The two shift leads open and close the store and supervise whoever is on shift. The six booksellers work the register, shelve, help customers and handle special orders. On the organization chart the owner would draw, every line of authority runs from the owner through the shift leads to the booksellers.

The writer has worked at the store for three years as a bookseller.

The Roles the Chart Leaves Out

The chart omits much of the work that keeps the store running. A role table lists eight recurring functions that no one was assigned but someone performs.

Writing the weekly staff schedule: done by Dana, a bookseller, for four years; never assigned; on her days off, nobody changes the schedule

Handling returns without receipts: done by Marcus, a shift lead, by informal agreement; other staff send these customers to him

Ordering for the children's section: done by Priya, a bookseller and former teacher; the owner signs her lists without changes

Carrying staff complaints to the owner: done by Dana; staff bring concerns to her rather than to the shift leads

Telling the owner no: done by Marcus, the only person who questions the owner's ideas in staff meetings

Training new booksellers on the register: done by whoever is on shift

Keeping the point-of-sale system running: done by the writer, who fixes printer and card reader problems

Organizing author events: done by Priya and the owner together, with no clear lead

Classifying the Roles

Benne and Sheats (1948) divided the roles people take in groups into three kinds: task roles that help the group get its work done, maintenance roles that keep relationships working, and individual roles that serve one person's needs at the group's expense. The store's unassigned roles fall mostly into the first two.

Scheduling, ordering for the children's section, handling receiptless returns, training and keeping the register system running are task roles. They are the kind Benne and Sheats called coordinator, information giver and procedure developer, and the store would stop functioning without them.

Carrying staff complaints is a maintenance role, close to what Benne and Sheats called the harmonizer or gatekeeper. Dana keeps tensions from building by bringing them to the owner in a form he will hear.

Telling the owner no is harder to classify. It works like a task role, since it prevents bad decisions, and like a maintenance role, since Marcus does it in a way the owner accepts. Benne and Sheats included an evaluator-critic among task roles, and Marcus fits that description, but his value depends on a relationship nobody else has.

No individual roles appeared in the table, though the writer notes that author events, with no clear lead, sometimes become a contest between Priya and the owner over who decides.

The Two Weeks Dana Was Away

Last spring Dana took two weeks of leave. Nobody else knew how she built the schedule, which balances booksellers' class schedules, second jobs and the shift leads' preferences. The owner tried to write it himself using the previous week's schedule as a template. Over two weeks, three shifts were double-booked and one Saturday morning had no shift lead. Staff complaints, which normally reached the owner through Dana, came to him directly and angrily, and one bookseller said in a staff meeting that she would look for another job.

Forsyth (2019) notes that informal roles often carry as much of a group's structure as formal ones, and that groups discover this when a role holder leaves. The store learned it in two weeks.

The schedule was never in the chart because it was in Dana's head.

How the Owner Sees It

When the writer showed the owner a draft of the role table, his first reaction was surprise at the scheduling entry. He had assumed the shift leads wrote the schedule together, because they hand it out. He knew Marcus pushed back in meetings but described it as Marcus's personality rather than a function the store relied on. He had never thought of the register system as anyone's job. His view of the store matched the formal chart almost exactly, which is common among owners of small businesses who are present every day but see the work through the structure they built. The gap between his picture and the role table is itself a finding: the person who controls the formal structure is the one least aware of the informal one.

What the Booksellers Said

Four booksellers read the table and agreed with it, with one addition. Two said that Priya also answers most customer questions about school reading lists, which they send her way. That role was added to her row. None of the booksellers wanted their own informal roles formalized without a conversation about pay.

Why Unassigned Roles Persist

Unassigned roles persist because they work until they do not. Each one grew from a person's skill or willingness: Dana was good at puzzles, Priya knew children's books, Marcus was not afraid of the owner. Nobody saw a reason to write them down, and writing them down might have raised questions about pay. Mintzberg (1979) observed that small organizations coordinate mostly through direct supervision and mutual adjustment, and Hollis Street Books relies on mutual adjustment far more than the chart suggests. The risk is that the store's structure exists in a few people.

The Writer's Own Role

The writer keeps the point-of-sale system running, a role taken on after fixing a card reader during a busy Saturday two years ago. Nobody else knows the vendor's support process or the workarounds for the receipt printer. If the writer left, the store would face the same kind of gap it faced with the schedule. Recognizing this was the most useful result of the analysis.

Recommendations

The store should make three changes. First, write down how each unassigned task role is done, beginning with the schedule and the register system, so that a second person can do it. Second, decide which roles should become formal, with recognition and possibly pay; scheduling and children's ordering are the clearest cases. Third, keep the maintenance roles informal, since carrying complaints and telling the owner no work because they rest on trust that a title might weaken.

References

Benne, K. D., & Sheats, P. (1948). Functional roles of group members. Journal of Social Issues, 4(2), 41-49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1948.tb01783.x

Forsyth, D. R. (2019). Group dynamics (7th ed.). Cengage.

Mintzberg, H. (1979). The structuring of organizations: A synthesis of the research. Prentice Hall.