LDR 300 Week 4 Leading Change and Intrapreneurship Example

The Livestream That Started in Springboro: Leading Change and Supporting Intrapreneurship in a Family Funeral Business

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

LDR/300: Innovative Leadership

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Hartwell Family Funeral Homes, its employees and its results are composites written for a model paper.

Hartwell Family Funeral Homes, a composite family funeral business with six locations in southwest Ohio, has spent the past three weeks examining its leadership. One innovation has already emerged without any plan. Eighteen months ago, Marcus Bell, a 26-year-old funeral director apprentice at the Springboro location, noticed that many families had relatives who could not travel. Using his own laptop and a borrowed camera, he began streaming services privately for families who asked. Within a year, 41 Springboro families had used the service, and several wrote to say it allowed a dying grandmother or a soldier overseas to take part. President Claire Hartwell now wants livestreaming at every location. This paper examines how she should lead the change and how Hartwell can encourage more employee innovation like Marcus's.

Four Issues in Organizational Change

Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) reviewed a decade of research on organizational change and organized it around four issues: content, meaning the substance of the change; context, meaning the setting inside and outside the organization; process, meaning how the change is carried out; and criteria, meaning the results by which it is judged. They noted that successful change depends on attention to all four, and that readiness for change and the participation of those affected are important process factors.

Resistance to Change

Oreg (2003) developed a measure of individual differences in dispositional resistance to change, describing four tendencies: a liking for routine, a strong emotional response when change is imposed, attention to the immediate hassle rather than later benefits and reluctance to change one's mind. People who score high on these dimensions resist even changes that benefit them. The measure helps explain why some Hartwell directors welcome livestreaming while others view it as intrusive.

Applying the Four Issues

Content: livestreaming services at all locations, with consistent equipment, privacy controls and staff training. Context: families increasingly live far apart, the pandemic made remote participation familiar and Hartwell's older directors value in-person tradition. Process: who introduces the change and how. Criterion: what success looks like, including family use and satisfaction and staff confidence.

Sources of Resistance at Hartwell

Interviews with directors at the other five locations revealed three concerns. Some worried about technical failure during a service, which would embarrass the family. Some saw cameras as intruding on grief. A few felt that a young apprentice's project was being promoted above their experience. These concerns line up with three of Oreg's tendencies: feeling that change is being forced, focusing on the near-term hassle and, for a few, simply preferring the familiar.

Defining Intrapreneurship

Antoncic and Hisrich (2001) defined intrapreneurship as entrepreneurship within an existing organization and refined the construct into dimensions including new business venturing, product and service innovation, self-renewal of the organization and proactiveness, along with risk taking and competitive aggressiveness. Testing their measure in the United States and Slovenia, they found intrapreneurship related to organizational growth and profitability. Marcus's livestreaming effort is a clear example of service innovation and proactiveness.

Diagnosing the Internal Environment

Kuratko et al. (2014) described an instrument for assessing the internal environment for corporate entrepreneurship, focusing on five factors: management support, work discretion or autonomy, rewards and reinforcement, time availability and organizational boundaries that allow ideas to move. Applying these factors to Hartwell reveals barriers. Management support was absent until results became visible. Marcus had autonomy only because his manager, Angela Ruiz, tolerated the experiment. There was no reward or recognition. He worked on livestreaming during his own time. And there was no path for the idea to reach other locations.

Hartwell got its best new service by accident, and the next good idea may not be so lucky.

Leading the Livestream Rollout

The rollout should involve directors from the start. Claire should ask Marcus and Angela to lead a working group with one director from each location, who will set standards for privacy, decide when families should be offered the option and test equipment. Professional equipment and a backup connection at each location address the fear of failure. A short written guide will explain how to offer livestreaming sensitively. Directors who are most resistant will be invited to observe a streamed service at Springboro before their own location begins.

Recognizing the Intrapreneur

Marcus should receive public recognition at the annual staff meeting, a bonus and support for completing his funeral director license. Recognition signals to all staff that initiative is valued.

A Pilot Before Full Rollout

Rather than equip all five remaining locations at once, the working group will start with two, Fairfield and Lebanon, where directors are most skeptical, and run livestreams for three months with Marcus available to help. If families and directors are satisfied, the other locations will follow. Starting where doubt is greatest may seem risky, but success there will persuade others more than success at a friendly location.

Lessons for Leaders

The livestreaming story holds a lesson for every manager at Hartwell: the people closest to families often see needs first. Leaders who ask frontline staff what families request, and who give them room to try small solutions, will find more ideas than any planning meeting produces.

Building an Idea Program

To make intrapreneurship deliberate, Hartwell will create a simple idea program. Any employee can propose an idea to a quarterly review by the leadership team. Approved ideas receive a small budget, up to eight paid hours a month for the proposer and a sponsor on the leadership team. Ideas that fail are discussed openly as learning.

Measures

Hartwell will track how many locations offer livestreaming after six months, the share of families who use it, family feedback, staff confidence after training and the number of ideas submitted and tested in the first year.

Conclusion

Research on organizational change shows that content, context, process and outcomes all matter and that resistance has understandable causes. Research on intrapreneurship shows that employee innovation depends on support, autonomy, rewards, time and open boundaries. Hartwell's livestreaming service began as one apprentice's initiative; leading its rollout with directors' participation and building an idea program can turn a lucky accident into a lasting capacity for innovation.

References

Antoncic, B., & Hisrich, R. D. (2001). Intrapreneurship: Construct refinement and cross-cultural validation. Journal of Business Venturing, 16(5), 495-527. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0883-9026(99)00054-3

Armenakis, A. A., & Bedeian, A. G. (1999). Organizational change: A review of theory and research in the 1990s. Journal of Management, 25(3), 293-315. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639902500303

Kuratko, D. F., Hornsby, J. S., & Covin, J. G. (2014). Diagnosing a firm's internal environment for corporate entrepreneurship. Business Horizons, 57(1), 37-47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2013.08.009

Oreg, S. (2003). Resistance to change: Developing an individual differences measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4), 680-693. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.680