Artistic Interventions : Arts, Leadership and Self-development in Organisations

Abstract: Our society is changing, becoming a postmodern world with more attention paid to the emotional part of human beings. Organisations must develop new skills to enhance their members’ creativity and provide innovation in order to tackle new challenges. The transformation of our society provides also space for new thinking and new solutions; there is a need to be more open-minded. Organisational managers hence look into new directions to answer issues – one of them is the arts. One of arts’ manifestations in organisations is artistic interventions. Our study provides a presentation of this process, our understanding and reflection about this field and why we think it is relevant for the postmodern society in which we live. In this thesis we present our vision and theory of how a manager transforms themself into a leader through an artistic intervention and the impact on the organisational culture that the latter produces. We highlight the importance of the intervention’s follow-up and the way in which managers/leaders can lead this process to success. Our research is based on the existing literature in different fields that we have found relevant and that has enabled us to develop our own theory on the topic, with hope that it will interest other researchers to go further. In that sense, we give directions and reflections for future research.