Arts higher education institutions in Indonesia carry a dual organisational character: they employ educational staff on permanent administrative appointments while simultaneously housing production-based study programmes whose work is assembled project by project. Human resource scholarship has addressed these two worlds separately, and no study has asked whether findings from one transfer to the other inside a single institution. This article examines how far a statistically supported mediation model of job rotation, competence, and work motivation on employee performance, established among the educational staff of Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta, is conceptually relevant to the management of film production crews in the same institution. The study combines a secondary summary of that model — a census of 185 educational staff analysed by structural equation modelling in AMOS 22 — with a thematic synthesis of twenty-one publications and policy documents on film and television production management in Indonesia and on project-based organising in the creative industries. The mediation model supports all seven hypothesised paths, with work motivation mediating the effects of both job rotation and competence. The synthesis identifies three parallels, each of them qualified: rotation for development corresponds only partly to placement by expertise; administrative competence and the national film competency standards share a measurement logic but not their content; and individual motivation is displaced in production by the producer’s situational leadership under deadline. The article contributes a testable set of propositions and shows that uniform human resource policy across administrative and production units cannot be assumed.