Adopting Agile Management Practices to Enhance Cultural Heritage Services and Visitor Engagement: Evidence from Museum and Cultural Tourism Institutions

Abstract

This paper examines how agile management practises affect cultural heritage service innovation and visitor experience to museum and cultural tourism institutions. The proposed study is based on the Agile Management Theory, Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) and Visitor Engagement Theory, which offers a theoretical framework that determines agility as a strategic resource and aligns better with the promotion of service quality, value-co-creation, and institutional performance. The quantitative research design was used and data gathered by visiting the museum managers and visitors were analysed by means of Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) and bootstrapping to determine the reliability, validity and structural relationships. The results show that agile management practises have a substantial effect on cultural heritage service innovation and service quality that further has a positive impact on visitor engagement; moreover, visitor engagement mediates to enhance the performance of the institution. The model exhibits acceptable levels of measurement reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, and large levels of explanatory power. The research article offers a contribution to the literature of tourism and cultural management by applying agile management theory, in the context of cultural heritage management, and incorporating it with service-dominant logic to explain the engagement-based outcomes of the performance, and provides the practical implications to the managers of museum and cultural tourism organisations who might want to improve adaptive service strategies and sustainable visitor experiences.