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The Theatre Budget Essay

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The case titled The Theatre Budget was a short journal about a frustrated Vice-President of a performing arts theatre that had a Board of Directors more concerned about artistic values than how they would pay the bills. Janet Dobbs was Vice President for Administration and President-elect for this small taxexempt organization called the Greater Euclid Little Theater (GELT). It is obvious in the case that there is a divide between industries; business administration/accounting and the arts. One can only imagine the frustration Dobbs faced trying to inform and educate a Board of Directors about the financial crisis at hand to only have it fall on deaf ears and have blunt resistance. Being a non-profit organization means
GELT needs to …show more content…

This brings the next topic of goal congruence into consideration. Since GELT, like any other organization, does not have a mind of its own, cannot have goals and are therefore actually the goals of the board and/or senior management. Senior management wants the organization to attain these goals but the goals are not always congruent with the personal goals of the operating managers and professionals; in this case,

Spaulding. Because participants tend to act in their own self-interest, the achievement of the organizational goals may be frustrated. (Young, D., p.127) This is the case with almost everyone involved! Dobbs wanted to get her point across to the Board and vice-versa. A lot can be said though about the fact that the budget committee was persuaded by Dobbs’s proposal. Here you have a team of individuals who understand finance, and then you have a Board of Directors who rejected it. Is this because the Board simply is not as fiscally knowledgeable or because they are just being resistant to change? The case does not give the reader the impression that there is much support towards the budget process at all yet the Board of Director’s thought Spaulding would view no salary increase as a lack of support; their priorities seem a little backwards when it comes to budgeting.
Any management control process includes two phases that deal with organizational

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