Museum Leadership Research Articles

Authentic leadership: bridging the gap between perception of organizational politics and employee attitudes in public sector museums

In museums’ dynamic and culturally rich environments, employee morale and productivity are crucial for achieving organizational goals. However, employees’ perception of organizational politics can undermine these objectives. Hence, this study investigates the buffering role of authentic leadership in mitigating perceptions of organizational politics and its subsequent effects on organizational citizenship behavior (OCBI and OCBO) and task-oriented performance among museum employees. This research involved 436 employees across six public sector museums in Pakistan, including supervisors and their immediate subordinates. Data were collected in four waves and analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The findings indicate that perceptions of organizational politics significantly negatively influence both organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBI and OCBO) and task-oriented performance. However, authentic leadership buffers these negative effects, significantly reducing perceptions of organizational politics and positively correlated with enhanced task-oriented performance and citizenship behavior. This study highlights the crucial role of authentic leadership in moderating the adverse impacts of organizational politics, fostering a positive work environment in museums, and enhancing both employee productivity and organizational outcomes. The insights from this research offer valuable implications for museum leaders aiming to enhance organizational performance through effective leadership practices.

Artistic Activism and Museum Accountability: Staging Antagonism in the Cultural Sphere

This article examines the diversity of tactical interventions that transpired at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019, culminating in the resignation of the vice-chairman of its Board of Trustees. Instead of accepting the myth of museum neutrality, the activist campaign, spearheaded by the action-oriented movement Decolonize This Place, treated the Whitney as a site of ideological struggle, permeated by inner divisions and conflicting interests. Through their organizing efforts, activists prefigured a movement-based form of cultural production, mapped connections between seemingly disparate struggles, and built decolonial solidarities. While the activists’ actions were essential to stage the antagonisms that had been dormant in the institution, a multiplicity of actors needed to step in during the process, creating multiple pressure points and taking sides in the division. To amplify the Whitney staffers’ attempt to hold the museum leadership accountable, they sought to bring political protest into the institution, challenging the very principle of counting who belongs to the community and who is excluded.

Knowledge management in museums: enhancing organizational performance and public value

PurposeThis study examines the enabling factors and practices that foster knowledge management in museums and the impact of those factors and practices on museums' performance and public value.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted an exploratory survey of senior leaders of 191 small and mid-sized museums in the United States. The survey tested a novel conceptual model that integrates the constructs of knowledge management enablers, knowledge management orientation and organizational performance. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses of survey data were conducted to identify both the presence and dimensions of these constructs as well as the nature of the relationships among them.FindingsThe results of this study identified strong and significant predictive relationships between the constructs of its novel conceptual model. However, findings also identified key gaps in how museums create, manage and share organizational knowledge. These gaps limit their organizational performance and their ability to create public value. The authors identify specific factors and practices that enable museums to improve their organizational performance and increase their public value.Originality/valueAs the first empirical study of knowledge management enablers and knowledge management orientation in museums, this research not only adapts the study of these constructs to the museum sector, but it develops a novel conceptual model that links these constructs to multiple dimensions of a museum's organizational performance and public value. This research sets the stage for new study of knowledge management in museums; it also provides valuable insights for museum leaders.

Museum Crip Space, By Any Other Name

ABSTRACT Museums and disabled people can create co-designed spaces that lead to a more authentic agency for museums as well as their audiences. Together they can center disability as significant program and exhibition content, include disability representation and perspectives, and ensure that environments — physical, communication, sensory, and attitudinal — are accessible, respectful, and welcoming. This article reports on survey responses by disability community members and their allies when asked to imagine museums as spaces where disabled people can find common ground and discuss important topics. It also provides guidance to museum educators about ways to open new conversations with their local disability communities, advocate for change within the museum, bring disabled people into their museum's leadership, staff, and volunteer corps, and strive to provide in museums a space, as described by journalist s.e. smith, “where everyone has that soaring sense of inclusion.” [smith, s.e. “The Beauty of Spaces Created for and by Disabled People.” in Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong, 274. New York: Vintage Books, 2020.]

Save the Ukrainian People First: They Carry their Culture in their Hearts

Save the Ukrainian People First: They Carry their Culture in their Hearts

‘ … Yet, it is still very White’: structural and cultural impediments to DEAI change in science museums

ABSTRACT Diversity, Equity, Access and Inclusion (DEAI) work in museums is multifaceted, but typically approached from the perspective of external audiences and outcomes rather than a change in internal organizational culture. This article discusses findings from a research study examining what happened in five US science museums that were making a concerted, officially recognized effort towards internal change, and explores what those findings reveal about field-wide barriers to appreciable systemic change along with the impacts of the current status quo on marginalized staff. This study focused specifically on science museums in the US, but we believe findings are also applicable to the broader field of informal learning to activate museum leadership in all disciplines to engage in systemic internal DEAI change by confronting tensions between mission and equity, and tackling hard issues by accepting the risk of discomfort rather than diverting emotional work to marginalized staff in a bottom–up approach to change.

The Significant Loss of Museum Educators in 2020: A Data Story

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented changes to the museum field in 2020. Significant among these changes are losses in museum education. Using data collected from museum educators and museum directors, the authors document and contextualize what they consider incongruous, detrimental impacts on museum education. Most troubling, when examined in the context of pre-pandemic trends, the losses in education suggest a paradox of sorts. Prior to the pandemic, museum education was taking an increasingly prominent role in the museum field with audience engagement becoming an increasing priority. So, how could museums reduce education departments and their resources at a time when serving audiences is paramount? Ultimately, the losses in museum education reveal its vulnerability. Museum leadership asserts the importance of museum education, but when push comes to shove, makes significant cuts to museum education departments.

Contemporary Dutch Museums in a Post-Covid Era

During the current outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, museums around the world have been forced to close their doors. Yet, responding to Covid-19 is just one of the challenges they are currently facing. In the aftermath of unprecedented times, international museum leaders are facing numerous obstacles and innovations. The debate about their future has become increasingly heated (Herwitz, 2021; Szanto 2020). The aim of this research is to consider different developments in the museum world, with an emphasis on the developments in the Netherlands.

Beyond the Museum: Leadership Experiences from VR Production Studios

AbstractAs digital technologies evolve at an exponential speed, the digital art scene has become ever more vivid in the past decades, with various forms of collaboration emerging between art museums, artists, curators, and audiences. While these collaborations are celebrated for their potential mutual benefits, such as knowledge exchange and the legitimizing effects on artworks, art museums struggle to maintain their relevance, and for this reason museum leadership has been deemed of critical importance. Historically, museum leadership has steered art museums through paradigm shifts using two approaches, namely, individual and relational. Nonetheless, the motivations for choosing these leadership approaches and their effects on guiding art museums into digital art remain unknown. In this study, we explore leadership approaches that contribute to museum‐studio collaboration on the creative output of digital art by tracing one of the enabling actors: creative studios. We choose this focus to understand how studios carry out the production and distribution of digital art in a collaborative setup. Through short ethnographic studies of two Copenhagen‐based VR art creative studios: Khora Contemporary and MAKROPOL, we argue that the choice of leadership approach in VR art production and distribution is contingently motivated by either market or knowledge‐oriented views of digital art. Consequently, contemporary art museums have the potential to become platforms that carefully negotiate ethical and contextual implications in leading digital art projects at the intersection of market and knowledge‐driven agendas.

Museums as supportive workplaces: an empirical enquiry in the UK museum workforce

ABSTRACT Museums’ vibrancy and viability are heavily dependent on supporting the development and well-being of talented and dedicated people. Although issues of organisational culture and good management have gained increasing importance for the sector, there is little empirical research on how leadership and day-to-day work conditions in museums shape workers’ job satisfaction and organisational commitment. Framed through organisation theory, this paper draws on survey data from UK museum staff and volunteers to examine the role of transformational leadership in driving workforce job satisfaction and organisational commitment outcomes, as mediated by key job resources and demands. Our findings show that where a transformational approach to leadership effectively communicates a shared organisational mission there is a positive impact on worker attitudes. Practical measures are suggested on how museum leaders can achieve such outcomes by inviting worker participation in decision-making, promoting a sense of task significance, highlighting impact on museum beneficiaries and reducing role ambiguity.

Unprecedented Leadership

Unprecedented Leadership

Leadership Legitimacy

Leadership Legitimacy

Museum Leadership for Engaging, Equitable Education: The Transformative Potential of Digitized Collections for Authentic Learning Experiences

AbstractMuseums are local‐to‐global organizations operating in a digitized, distributed, and diverse 21st century world. Museums leaders face significant challenges in achieving broader relevance, meaningful engagement, and equitable outreach. This article examines the transformative potential of digitized collections to increase public engagement and enhance authentic educational efforts of museums, with specific emphasis on visual media as a key resource to achieve these outcomes. Using digitized collections to broaden learning opportunities and support a wide range of users will require museum leaders to engage in strategic digitization efforts—supplementing research images, making conscious decisions about meeting educational needs when setting digitization policies, and investing in meaningful outreach with digitized collections. Educational opportunities are contextualized with brief case studies of authentic investigations for middle school learners using digitized objects from a natural history museum. Three lessons learned during development and evaluation are described and implications for museum leaders are discussed.

Board Age Diversity and the Future of Museum Leadership

AbstractAge diversity is an often‐overlooked dimension of museum board diversity, yet the future of board leadership lies with younger generations, and museum sustainability in the present also depends on the contributions of younger patrons today. Critical issues of board representation cannot be fixed overnight, but a step in the right direction is board age diversity. As the entity that hires and evaluates the executive director and provides fiscal oversight for the institution, it is crucial that the board reflects the demographics and values of the people the museum is trying to serve. Younger generations are more socially connected and socially aware, and they want to change the world now; data, however, suggests that fewer young people see museums as aligning with these values, creating an urgency to engage and build loyalty with these next generation patrons. Recruiting board members without decades of professional experience makes it imperative that museums prioritize leadership development from the beginning. By cultivating younger donors for future giving and leadership positions and capitalizing on their unique insights now, museums will be able to remain relevant for years to come. This article presents a detailed action plan for museums on how to recruit, develop, and retain younger board members to ensure museum sustainability now and in the future.

Reconsidering People as the Institution: Empathy, Pay Equity, and Deaccessioning as Key Leadership Strategies in Art Museums

AbstractDrawing on recent research in empathy, pay equity, and deaccessioning practice in U.S. art museums, this paper argues for a creative reconsideration of art museums by reframing the institutions not in terms of their buildings or their collections but their people. The coronavirus pandemic has offered a break in art museums’ physical stories and called into sharp relief managerial trade‐offs between support of staff and sale of objects. By focusing on empathy, pay equity, and deaccessioning strategies, art museum leaders can imaginatively and analytically renew the social contract between art museums and their workforces and audiences, creating new structures of pay equity and firmer financial footing and more robust community governance in order to weather future challenges with equanimity and focus. By focusing on empathy and equity, museums also build their own resilience instead of risking closure for financial reasons without public trust to fall back on.

АРКАДИЙ ЯКОВЛЕВИЧ ТУГАРИНОВ И СТАНОВЛЕНИЕ КРАСНОЯРСКОГО МУЗЕЯ

The authors of this article continue to explore the history of museum science in Siberia through biographies of museum experts. Based on the biographic materials of the native of Saratov Arkadiy Tugarinov (1880–1948) they trace the formation of his interests to study of local nature and history. They point out that this interest was not accidental. Since the middle of the 19th century, when the disgraced historian Kostomarov was in Saratov, that city has developed as a center of local studies. The article shows that Tugarinov graduated from a real school, but could not study at the university. He lost his father early and had to help his family. He worked in the soil laboratory of the Saratov provincial district council. He joined the Society of naturalists, studied the flora and fauna of the Volga territories. Soon he began to work in Saratov Museum, and participated in the 11th Congress of Russian naturalists and doctors in St. Petersburg. So he became known among researchers and museum workers. In 1905, Tugarinov was invited to take up the post of curator of Krasnoyarsk Museum. Created in 1889 with private funds of the merchant couple Matveyevs the museum eventually acquired the status of urban one. Since 1903, the museum was managed by the Krasnoyarsk sub-department of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Then the department guidance invited A. Tugarinov to head the museum. So A.Ya. Tugarinov ran the Krasnoyarsk Museum for more than 20 years, from 1905 to 1926. He was concerned about attracting people devoted to museum work to the Krasnoyarsk museum. He organized many expeditions through Siberia, the participants of which delivered to the museum collections on zoology, botany, history, ethnography, archaeology and others. All objects delivered to Museum were described, systemized and used to create expositions and exhibitions, as well as to write scientific works. The most famous scientific articles based on museum collections were prepared by Arkadiy Tugarinov, Nikola Auerbakch, Maria Krasnozhenova and former Austrian prisoner of the World War I Gero von Mergart. In total, during the years of Tugarinov's work, the funds of the Krasnoyarsk Museum reached 144000 items. In terms of the overall performance of its work, the Krasnoyarsk Museum came out on top in Siberia. Authors of this articles believed that A.Ya. Tugarinov was one of the most successful museum leaders; he proved that museum activity is the most important factor in the development of science and education in Siberia.

Uncertain Future

Uncertain Future

As danças do Nordeste brasileiro nos museus sobre Luiz Gonzaga “o rei do baião”

De que maneira os museus enquanto lugares da memória de Luiz Gonzaga representam sua participação no processo de mediação cultural das danças regionais – xote, xaxado e baião –para o restante do país? A fim de responder a esta questão, nosso objetivo foi analisar o papel dos museus que tematizam a biografia de Luiz Gonzaga como instrumento de preservação histórica das danças do Sertão do Nordeste brasileiro. Para tanto, tomamos como conteúdo cinco matérias, oito fotos, um filme e uma letra musical encontradas em três museus nas cidades de Exu, Serra Talhada e Recife no estado do Pernambuco – Brasil. Além das fontes documentais, valemo-nos da entrevista semiestruturada para captar a visão dos dirigentes dos museus. Concluímos que as matérias sobre Luiz Gonzaga nas fontes documentais cumprem a função pedagógica do ensino destas danças através de suas ações de preservação, contribuindo para o processo de expansão das danças regionais no resto do país.

The Missing Women of Sande: A Necessary Exercise in Museum Decolonization

The Missing Women of Sande: A Necessary Exercise in Museum Decolonization

Configuring Interdependence: How Leaders Deal with Multiple Paradoxical Demands

Recent management research has surfaced how today’s organizational leaders experience a multitude of interconnected, yet persistently opposing demands in their work. Several literatures are conceptualizing these tensions and the need to reconcile them as ambidexterity, institutional pluralism or paradox. Common to all of them is the overwhelming tendency to conceptualise these tensions as operating between pairs of competing imperatives. However, many organizations operate in multipolar environments, requiring leaders to manage tensions between more than two demands. Drawing from a dataset that includes in-depth interviews with 42 Directors and CEOs of British National Museums, we inductively develop a framework of how senior British museum leaders dynamically engage culture, corporate and community demands to obtain economic resources, reach communities, and elevate the cultural relevance of their museums. Counter-intuitively, our data suggests that introducing a third demand may in fact ease tensions between coexisting elements and help leaders construct conflicting elements as interdependent. Through showing how leaders configure this interdependence, we make three contributions. First, by moving beyond duality, we show how considering more than two elements in a tension can be interdependent in a contradictory yet mutually constitutive manner. This contributes to a more realistic appreciation of the nature of interdependence, and the challenge of leading organizations in complex systems. Second, we direct attention to the relational and multifaceted nature of the poles of paradoxes. This provides a richer understanding of how poles of paradoxes, and tensions between them, are constructed and managed. Finally, we extend our existing understanding of the outcomes of the management of interdependence. This points towards a more holistic understanding of how transcendence can be created within the context of complex, multi-elemental tensions.