Performance indicators and Opera Houses. A preliminary reflection

Management of arts and cultural organizations has recently gained importance especially in those countries with a rich cultural heritage. This is even truer in the performing arts sector where poor funding for institutions has imposed severe budget constraints and pushed them to seek financial interventions of foundations, private investors and commercial sponsors. Recent studies have focused on cultural organizations performance measurement and only a small number of them on Opera Houses performance measurement. The main contribution of the paper is that of a critical review and an enlargement of performance indicator systems proposed for cultural organizations in national and international literature and concretely adopted by managers of Opera Houses. We reflect on the multidimensional nature of PIs and their ambivalence, concluding they should be incorporated into a complete, synthetic, not ambiguous, consistent and unitary system. Such a system should be a sort of management tableau de bord, functional for: 1) strategic conduction/planning and operative control, 2) communication of performance results to external stakeholders, 3) comparative performance evaluation through benchmarking.