MGMT 5003 Module 2 Organizational Structure and Decision Rights Analysis Example

Who Decides at Casey's? Structure and Decision Rights From the Ankeny Support Center to the Store Kitchen

Student Name

American College of Education

MGMT5003: Foundations of Business Management

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

June 14, 2027

Introduction

My first paper for this course used the four management functions to describe Casey's General Stores, the Iowa-based convenience chain with 2,944 stores in 19 states. This paper looks at one part of organizing more closely: the company's structure, and where each kind of decision is actually made. An organization chart shows boxes and lines, but the more useful question for a newcomer is where a given decision gets made, whether that is the price of fuel, the menu in a store kitchen or the choice to buy another chain. Using the company's fiscal 2026 annual report, this paper maps decisions from the board to the store, explains the logic of the design and considers its tradeoffs.

Structure Is a Choice

Early organization theory often treated structure as something determined by a firm's size, technology or environment. Child (1972) challenged that view, arguing that managers make strategic choices about structure within those constraints, and that the same environment can support different designs. That idea is useful for Casey's, because a convenience chain could be organized in several ways, for example by giving regional managers wide authority over local stores or by franchising stores to independent owners. Casey's has chosen neither. Its annual report describes a company that owns and runs its own stores and reports them together as one business, on the reasoning that every location offers much the same goods, processes and customers (Casey's General Stores, Inc., 2026).

The Top: Board, Chief Executive and Officers

At the top, the board of directors oversees the company through committees, and the annual report notes that the audit committee reviews cybersecurity and information technology risk with the chief information officer and chief information security officer. The president and chief executive officer is identified as the company's chief operating decision maker, the person who decides how to allocate resources and capital, using net income and its variance from forecast each month, quarter and year (Casey's General Stores, Inc., 2026). Reporting to the chief executive are the finance and operations chiefs and a wider group of officers; the report mentions change of control agreements with 34 officers besides the chief executive. Major decisions, such as acquisitions and the three-year strategic plan, belong here.

The Center: The Store Support Center

Casey's calls its Ankeny headquarters the Store Support Center, a name that signals its purpose: to support stores rather than simply to command them. In practice, many decisions are made there. Stores place merchandise orders electronically to the support center, which fills them from the company's three distribution centers. The support center sets site-selection criteria for new stores, which emphasize local population and daily highway traffic. It decides the standard store designs, the product range, the private label offerings and the prepared food menu, and it runs the Casey's Rewards program, which had more than 10 million members by the end of fiscal 2026. About 3 percent of the workforce works there or performs its functions.

Logistics: Distribution and Fuel

A distinctive part of the structure is logistics. Casey's operates three distribution centers, in Ankeny, Terre Haute and Joplin, and delivers most of its own fuel with a fleet of more than 500 tractors, along with a fuel terminal in Waco, Texas. About 1 percent of the workforce works in or supports the distribution centers and another 1 percent are fuel or grocery drivers. Keeping logistics inside the company, rather than relying entirely on wholesalers, puts decisions about supply, delivery timing and fuel purchasing in the company's own hands. Those decisions matter: fuel was about 60 percent of revenue in fiscal 2026, and fuel margin per gallon is one of the measures the company reports most prominently.

The Field and the Store

Field management, about 1 percent of the workforce, links the support center to the stores. The annual report describes development programs for district managers, store managers and kitchen managers, which suggests a chain of authority from districts to stores and, within each store, to the kitchen. About 94 percent of the company's nearly 50,000 team members work in stores. Store managers decide how to staff shifts, handle guests and keep the store running, and kitchen managers run food preparation to the company's standards. The report also notes that store hours may be adjusted store by store to match guest traffic, one of the few operating decisions it describes as local. Store teams also have a direct channel around their managers: the company's ethics and compliance hotline lets team members and guests report concerns confidentially, a small but real piece of decentralized voice in a centralized design.

Why Centralize

The logic of this design follows from Casey's strategy. A standard store model, with a full kitchen and a common layout, works best when the menu, equipment, suppliers and training are decided once and repeated thousands of times. Central decisions also give the company purchasing power with suppliers and make it possible to convert acquired stores quickly; the report explains that acquired stores are typically rebranded once a full kitchen has been installed. A single reportable segment reinforces the point. Rather than running fuel, grocery and food as separate businesses with their own managers, Casey's treats each store as one unit that sells all three. The company's single profit measure, net income against forecast, also fits a centralized design, since one leader can compare every store on the same basis.

The Costs of Centralization

Every structure has costs. A small-town store manager who sees a local opportunity, such as a weekend event that would justify extra pizza staff or a product local customers keep requesting, has limited authority to act on it. Central decisions can be slow to reflect regional differences, a growing concern as the company expands into Texas and other southern states through acquisitions, where tastes and competitors differ from Iowa. And with roughly one field manager for every hundred or so store team members, district managers must oversee many stores at a distance. Research on large American firms by Rajan and Wulf (2006) found that companies have been flattening, with more managers reporting directly to the chief executive, a reminder that structures are revisited as firms grow.

What Would Change My View

This analysis rests on what a public annual report reveals, which is mostly the formal design. It does not show how much informal discretion district and store managers actually exercise, or whether the support center listens when field managers push back. Interviews with a district manager and two store managers, or the company's own internal policy documents, would test whether decision rights work the way the report implies. If store managers turned out to have wide discretion over local pricing or staffing, the structure would look more decentralized than the annual report suggests.

Conclusion

Casey's is a centralized organization by design. Decisions about capital, acquisitions and strategy sit with the chief executive and officers; decisions about products, menus, store design, supply and the rewards program sit with the Store Support Center; logistics are kept in-house; and stores execute a standard model with limited local authority. That design supports consistency and purchasing power at the cost of local flexibility, a tradeoff that will be tested as the company grows into new regions.

References

Casey's General Stores, Inc. (2026). Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended April 30, 2026. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/726958/000072695826000046/casy-20260430.htm

Child, J. (1972). Organizational structure, environment and performance: The role of strategic choice. Sociology, 6(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/003803857200600101

Rajan, R. G., & Wulf, J. (2006). The flattening firm: Evidence from panel data on the changing nature of corporate hierarchies. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 88(4), 759-773. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest.88.4.759