Starbucks Organizational Change: An Action Research Analysis
This paper applies action research and organizational development frameworks to analyze the managerial challenges currently facing Starbucks. Drawing on scholarship by Haneberg (2005), Lurey and Griffin (2013), and McLean (2006), the paper examines how Starbucks has drifted from its founding identity as a community-centered "third place" toward a high-volume, grab-and-go model. It evaluates the company's past use of action research — including large-scale employee retraining and international market research — while arguing that recent reforms have been reactive and piecemeal rather than systematic. The paper concludes that Starbucks must undertake broader, longer-range strategic change to restore its core value proposition and remain competitive against lower-priced specialty coffee rivals.
- Introduction: Starbucks and Its Identity Crisis: Starbucks' drift from community brand to commodity
- Mitigating Problems Through Organizational Development: OD consultants and action research as solutions
- Action Research in Practice at Starbucks: Past reforms and their systemic limitations
- The Most Challenging Steps in Action Research: Prioritization and long-range strategic evaluation
- Conclusion: The Path Forward for Starbucks: Broad change needed to restore competitive identity
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- It grounds a real-world business case — Starbucks' decline from progressive icon to criticized corporation — in recognized organizational development theory, lending academic credibility to a familiar subject.
- It moves logically from problem identification to prescribed solutions, mirroring the very action research cycle it describes, which gives the argument structural coherence.
- It balances concrete operational details (Starbucks Pickup with Amazon Go, employee retraining, menu simplification) with broader strategic critique, demonstrating both applied and theoretical thinking.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied theory integration: it takes a multi-step academic framework (action research) and maps each phase onto actual decisions made by a named organization. Rather than describing the framework abstractly, the writer evaluates where Starbucks has succeeded and, more importantly, where it has fallen short of systematic, congruent change — a critical-application move that distinguishes analysis from mere description.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by establishing Starbucks' original identity and the nature of its current problems. It then introduces the action research and organizational development literature as analytical tools. The middle sections assess Starbucks' past and present use of these tools, identifying both strengths and gaps. The closing section focuses on the most demanding phase of action research — long-range strategic evaluation — and connects it to specific unresolved challenges including labor practices and international expansion. The references are formatted in APA style.
Introduction: Starbucks and Its Identity Crisis
Although I am currently employed in the Navy, I have also worked for private organizations, including, most notably, Starbucks. Starbucks is one of the most famous food and beverage companies in the world, and it initially generated a great deal of goodwill — as well as strong sales — because of its image as a progressively minded organization that cared about communities while offering distinctive coffee beverages that were a cut above the competition in the fast-food industry. However, many people today believe Starbucks has lost its way.
Starbucks initially promoted itself as a so-called third place — somewhere between home and work where people could enjoy coffee, company, or simply a relaxing moment with a meal (Rainey, 2022). Today, however, more than 80% of the company's beverages are sold to-go (Rainey, 2022). Additionally, although Starbucks was once praised for offering health insurance to part-time employees, Fair Trade coffee, and better working conditions, both its products and its treatment of employees have come under fire. Employees complain of unrealistic expectations regarding how many orders they must fulfill within a short span of time, beverages are criticized for being overly expensive, and the company is faulted for crowding out independent stores and bakeries (Rainey, 2022).
Management must find a way to rebrand the organization and foster more positive feelings among employees for the company to thrive in the future. The biggest challenge is ensuring Starbucks still offers a strong value proposition as a unique product — an increasingly difficult task as more people work from home and more companies offer similar specialty coffees at lower price points. The reason management may struggle with this issue is the sheer size of Starbucks today. The company began with an emphasis on a strong personal connection to its customers; it is now an international organization.
Mitigating Problems Through Organizational Development
Organizational development consultants can offer an outside perspective, which can be especially helpful for companies that have become highly insular. Action research consultants, according to Lurey and Griffin (2013), focus on establishing priorities for change, collecting and interpreting data, analyzing and disseminating the results of the research, creating an action plan, implementing the action plan, and evaluating the results. Starbucks has implemented this approach in the past when faced with problems — most famously engaging in a wide-ranging retraining of all employees in how to make its coffee beverages in response to criticisms that quality had declined. It also conducts significant research on the tastes of new markets when expanding internationally and works with local partners to ensure a smoother launch into each new environment.
Starbucks has shown openness to responding to certain customer concerns, including simplifying its ordering menu with visuals to increase the speed of order-taking — identified as a significant source of delay (Rainey, 2022). The company has also attempted to address the demand for faster service by creating new express stores called Starbucks Pickup with Amazon Go. However, these solutions, while they address specific customer demands identified through data gathering, do not tackle the core issue: how to build a value proposition based on community — its stated vision and mission — while still offering speed.
Action Research in Practice at Starbucks
According to McLean (2006), what makes organizational development unique is its planned and systematic nature — a quality that does not seem fully evident in some of Starbucks' most recent reforms. Planned and systematic changes must remain congruent with the organization's core purpose, which Starbucks has always identified as community, even before the specific type of coffee it served. The fact that stores have focused on grab-and-go alternatives and that takeout demand has driven recent operational decisions suggests that this fundamental challenge has not yet been adequately addressed.
Conclusion: The Path Forward for Starbucks
Starbucks has demonstrated a willingness to change, but the changes it must undertake going forward need to be more broad-ranging and far-reaching than those it has pursued in the past if it wishes to maintain its high market share. Piecemeal operational fixes have addressed surface-level symptoms without restoring the coherent, community-centered identity that originally set the brand apart. A truly systematic application of the action research cycle — one that honestly evaluates whether current reforms align with the organization's founding mission — is essential for Starbucks to reclaim its position as something more than a convenient but unremarkable coffee chain.
References
Haneberg, L. (2005). Chapter 3: The action research approach to change. Organization development basics. Alexandria, VA: American Society for Training & Development. [EBSCO eBook Business Collection.]
Lurey, J., & Griffin, M. (2013). Section 2, Chapter 4: Action research: The anchor of OD practice. In J. Vogelsang (Ed.), Handbook for strategic HR: Best practices in organization development from the OD Network (pp. 46–52). Saranac Lake, NY: AMACOM Books.
McLean, G. N. (2006). Chapter 1: What is organization development? Organization development: Principles, processes, performance. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. [EBSCO eBook Business Collection.]
Rainey, C. (2022, March). What happened to Starbucks. Fast Company.
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.