Processi evolutivi delle organizzazioni museali. Motivazione delle risorse umane, job design e orientamento al cliente

Abstract Over the last decades, museums have gone through a deep change, from the traditional institution for cultural heritage conservation to a place for the purpose of culture education, study and enjoyment. In so doing, museums’ activities are increasingly inspired by the importance of meeting social needs, so as to be considered as a service organization, whose aim is especially the management of visitors’ experience. From this point of view, museum employees and their customer orientation play a key role in the museum’s performance. Starting from this premise, the purpose of this research is to empirically investigate the influence of some individual (i.e. intrinsic motivation, identified motivation) and job design variables (i.e. job autonomy) on museums employees’ customer orientation. This work emphasizes the importance for museums to build a customer-oriented organizational culture by acting upon training activities, likely to support an appropriate human resource management strategy and foster employees’ customer orientation.