The Culture of Empowerment: Driving and Sustaining Change

Mary Theresa Seig

Conner Prairie wanted to enhance their visitors' experience so they worked on empowering their "front line staff workers." Staff workers collaboratively created solutions that were their own.

Seig used the "Fly on the Wall" method to collect data and used discourse analysis to show that the "monologue culture" at Conner Prairie was not meeting the visitors' needs. Management worked on changing the culture of Conner Prairie from the top-down and creating solutions from the bottom-up.