Entrepreneurs’ personal value, organizational culture and leadership practice in the performing arts industry of Taiwan

This exploratory study examines the relationship between performing arts entrepreneurs’ personal values and organizational cultures, and their ways of transforming values into enterprises. To do so, mixed research methods were developed and conducted through two surveys with 44 Taiwanese performing arts entrepreneurs, and one semi-structured interview with 4 Taiwanese performing arts entrepreneurs. Based on four categories of Schwartz’s portrait values theory, the research finds that self-transcendence and openness to change are two dominant values among participants. With Cameron and Quinn’s competing values framework with four types of organizational culture, the research identifies collaborative and creative cultures as the two most common organizational cultures of performing arts enterprises. Also, a positive and moderate relationship between leaders’ personal values and internal cultures may work best for creating a sustaining achievement. The relationship models can be practiced through both direct and indirect way of transformation, and the latter requires two facilitators; one is a relevance between the dominant and second dominant relationship models, another one is the commonality between dominant and second dominant value as well as the commodity between dominant and second dominant culture. The research also considers a well-developed emotional intelligence to be important and suggests applying visionary style as a main approach to establish the relationship. Apart from that, the ability to implement affiliative, coaching, pacesetting and democratic styles for dealing with different circumstances has determinant influence for a performing arts leader to build the relationship model.