University of Twente Student Theses
How leadership influences the success of Dutch music festivals
Veenendaal, M. van (2017) How leadership influences the success of Dutch music festivals.
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| Abstract: | Situation & complication: Literature has shown that organizations of today’s business environment have to be capable of reacting to fast environmental changes. Moreover, proactive behaviours, personal initiative, autonomy and teamwork are increasingly important for job performance. Having an effective organizational culture is especially important within project management organizations such as the event industry. Events have become an important industry and within this industry, music festivals are essential for generating revenue and are becoming more popular in the Netherlands. Because of this popularity and importance of music festivals, gaining competitive advantages is crucial. To be unique and attractive, being creative and innovative within project boundaries is of great importance. There is a lack of information in existing literature on how leaders can encourage and control employees to be creative and take initiative. This information is of great importance for success. The phenomenon in the context of event management and leadership is not studied much and because of its specific dynamics it is an excellent research context to broaden the literature on leadership. Research question: To broaden leadership literature focusing on the music festival/event industry on the topic of encouragement and influences of leadership, the following research question is developed: “How and when do leaders in the event/music festival industry encourage their employees to take initiative and be creative within a set of pre-determined project boundaries?” Methodology: Because this research is focussed on expertise and experiences of managers in successful music festival organizations, qualitative research is executed. To get insight in how managers control and encourage their employees in music festival organizations, the type of data collection used is semi-structured interviews. Because of the population of this research, which are managers and leaders of successful music festival organizations or project groups, the technique used in this research is non-probability sampling. There is no list available of successful managers in the Netherlands and they are difficult to reach. However, despite this difficulty, this research includes a sample of 14 successful leaders from small and large music festival organizations in the Netherlands. Conclusion & recommendations: Existing literature and results from the conducted interviews show that there are several important project management success factors. Existing literature and the results from the interviews had many similarities. The interviews have provided some new insights for project management success factors within the event industry. The most important success factors are: challenging projects, team-building, appreciation, learning from mistakes, planning, ability to change and adapt, open communication, creating memorable experiences, being creative within the budget, having good artists/facilities, characteristics of employees and promotion through social media. Besides these success factors, results show that there are several factors and behaviours from leaders which influence creativity and personal initiative of employees. These are: role-modelling, intellectual stimulation and knowledge diffusion, providing vision, consulting, personalized delegating, support for innovation, feedback, appreciating and proper task assignment. Moreover, the timing of encouragement of creativity and personal initiative is during the whole process of organization. Where in the starting period generating ideas is favourable and during the event problem solution. Lastly, practical recommendations for leaders are: encourage open communication, being a team, provide clear goals, being a role-model, provide integrative tasks, effectively connect employees, create a horizontal hierarchy, appreciate and give feedback, handle a loose management style with personalized control/delegation, and arrange creative moments. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 85 business administration, organizational science |
| Programme: | Business Administration MSc (60644) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/71818 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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