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Why are some lean workfloor teams able to improve their already high performance, over time, and others not? By studying teams' and leaders' behaviour-value patterns, this abductive field study uncovers a dynamic capability at the team level.

Various methods were employed over three consecutive years to thoroughly examine five initially high-performing lean workfloor teams, including their leaders. These methods encompassed micro-behavioural coding of 59 h of film footage, surveys, individual and group interviews, participant observation and archival data, involving objective and perceptual team-performance indicators. Two of the five teams continued to improve and perform highly.

Continuously improving high lean team performance is found to be associated with (1) team behaviours such as frequent performance monitoring, information sharing, peer support and process improvement; (2) team leaders who balance, over time, task- and relations-oriented behaviours; (3) higher-level leaders who keep offering the team face-to-face support, strategic clarity and tangible resources; (4) these three actors' endorsement of self-transcendence and openness-to-change work values and alignment, over time, with their behaviours; and (5) coactive vicarious learning-by-doing as a “stable collective activity pattern” among team, team leader, and higher-level leadership.

Since lean has been undertheorised, the authors invoked insights from organisational behaviour and management theories, in combination with various fine- and coarse-grained data, over time. The authors uncovered actors' behaviour-value patterns and a collective learning-by-doing pattern that may explain continuous lean team performance improvement. Four theory-enriching propositions were developed and visualised in a refined model which may already benefit lean practitioners.

With the growing need for employees to be innovative, public-sector organizations are investing in employee training. This study aims to examine the effects of a combined Lean Six Sigma and innovation training, using action learning, on public-sector employees’ creative role identity and innovative work behavior.

The authors studied a public service agency in Singapore in which a five-day Lean Innovation Training was implemented, using a combination of Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools, with a simulation on day one and subsequent team-based project coaching, spread over six months. The authors administered pre- and postintervention surveys among all the employees, and initiated group interviews and observations before, during and after the intervention.

Creative role identity and innovative work behavior had significantly improved six months after the intervention, enabled through senior management’s transformational leadership. The training induced managers to role-model innovative work behaviors while cocreating, with their employees, a renewal of their agency’s core processes. The three completed improvement projects contributed to an innovative work culture and reduced service turnaround time.

Starting with a role-playing simulation on the first day, during which leaders and followers swapped roles, the action-learning type training taught all the organizational members to use various Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools. This nimble Lean Innovation Training, and subsequent team-based project coaching, exemplifies how advancing the staff’s creative role identity can have a positive impact.

The complexity and uncertainty of healthcare operations increasingly require agility to safeguard a high quality of care. Using a microfoundations of dynamic capabilities perspective, this study investigates the effects of nurses' implicit voice theories (IVTs) on the behaviors that influence their individual agility.

This research uses quantitative survey data collected from 2,552 Canadian nurses during the fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the fall of 2021. Structural equation modeling is used to test a conceptual model that hypothesizes the effects of three different IVTs on nurses' creativity, spontaneity, agility and the quality of care they deliver to patients.

The results reveal that voice-inhibiting cognitions (like “suggestions are criticisms for higher-ups”, “I first need a solution or solid data”, and “speaking up has negative repercussions”) negatively impact nurses' creativity and spontaneity in crafting solutions to problems they face daily. In turn, this affects nurses' individual agility as they attempt to adapt to changing circumstances and, ultimately, the quality of care they provide to their patients.

Even if organizations have little control over employees' pre-held beliefs regarding voice, they can still reverse them by developing and nurturing a voice-welcoming culture to boost their workers' agility.

This study combines two theoretical frameworks, voice theory and dynamic capabilities theory, to study how individual-level factors (cognitions and behaviors) contribute to nurses' individual agility and the quality of care they provide to their patients. It answers the recent calls of scholars to study the mechanisms through which healthcare operations can develop and sustain dynamic capabilities, such as agility, and better face the “new normal”.

As a problem-solving tool, the kaizen event (KE) is underutilised in practice. Assuming this is due to a lack of group process quality during those events, the authors aimed to grasp what is needed during high-quality KE meetings. Guided by the phased approach for structured problem-solving, the authors built and explored a measure for enriching future KE research.

Six phases were used to code all verbal contributions (N = 5,442) in 21 diverse, videotaped KE meetings. Resembling state space grids, the authors visualised the course of each meeting with line graphs which were shown to ten individual kaizen experts as well as to the filmed kaizen groups.

From their reactions to the graphs the authors extracted high-quality KE process characteristics. At the end of each phase, that should be enacted sequentially, explicit group consensus appeared to be crucial. Some of the groups spent too little time on a group-shared understanding of the problem and its root causes. Surprisingly, the mixed-methods data suggested that small and infrequent deviations (“jumps”) to another phase might be necessary for a high-quality process. According to the newly developed quantitative process measure, when groups often jump from one phase to a distant, previous or next phase, this relates to low KE process quality.

A refined conceptual model and research agenda are offered for generating better solutions during KEs, and the authors urge examinations of the effects of well-crafted KE training.

Although empirical tests of effective lean-team leadership are scarce, leaders are often blamed when lean work-floor initiatives fail. In the present study, a lean-team leader’s work values are assumed to affect his or her team members’ behaviors and, through them, to attain team effectiveness. Specifically, two of Schwartz et al.’s (2012) values clusters (i.e. self-transcendence and conservation) are hypothesized to be linked to team members’ degree of information and idea sharing and, in turn, to lean-team effectiveness. The paper aims to report the examination of these hypotheses.

Survey responses (n=429) of both leaders and members of 25 lean-teams in services and manufacturing organizations were aggregated, thereby curbing common-source bias. To test the six hypotheses, structural equation modeling was performed, with bootstrapping, linear regression analyses, and Sobel tests.

The positive relationship between lean-team effectiveness and leaders’ self-transcendence values, and the negative relationship between lean-team effectiveness and leaders’ conservation values were partly mediated by information sharing behavior within the team.

Future research must compare the content of effective lean-team values and behaviors to similar non-lean teams.

Appoint lean-team leaders with predominantly self-transcendence rather than conservation values: to promote work-floor sharing of information and lean-team effectiveness.

Human factors associated with effective lean-teams were examined, thereby importing organization-behavioral insights into the operations management literature: with HRM-type implications.

Many manufacturers are exploring adopting smart technologies in their operations, also referred to as the shift towards “Industry 4.0”. Employees' contribution to high-tech initiatives is key to successful Industry 4.0 technology adoption, but few studies have examined the determinants of employee acceptance. This study, therefore, aims to explore how managers affect employees' acceptance of Industry 4.0 technology, and, in turn, Industry 4.0 technology adoption.

Rooted in the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model and social exchange theory, this inductive research follows an in-depth comparative case study approach. The two studied Dutch manufacturing firms engaged in the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in their primary processes, including cyber-physical systems and augmented reality. A mix of qualitative methods was used, consisting of field visits and 14 semi-structured interviews with managers and frontline employees engaged in Industry 4.0 technology adoption.

The cross-case comparison introduces the manager's need to adopt a transformational leadership style for employees to accept Industry 4.0 technology adoption as an organisational-level factor that extends existing Industry 4.0 technology user acceptance theorising. Secondly, manager's and employee's recognition and serving of their own and others' emotions through emotional intelligence are proposed as an additional individual-level factor impacting employees' acceptance and use of Industry 4.0 technologies.

Synthesising these insights with those from the domain of Organisational Behaviour, propositions were derived from theorising the social aspects of effective Industry 4.0 technology adoption.

Lean remains popular in a wide range of private and public sectors and continues to attract a significant amount of research. However, most of this research is not grounded in theory. This paper presents and discusses different expert viewpoints on the role of theory in lean research and practice and provides guidelines for future research.

Seven experienced lean authors independently provide their views to the question “is Lean a theory?” before Rachna Shah summarizes the viewpoints and provides a holistic outlook for lean research.

Authors agree, disagree and sometimes agree to disagree. However, a close look reveals agreement on several key points. The paper concludes that Lean is not a theory but has plenty of theoretical underpinnings. Many lean-related theories provide promising opportunities for future research.

As researchers, we are asked to justify our research drawing on “theory,” but what does that mean for a practice-driven phenomenon such as lean? This paper provides answers and directions for future research.

Lean implementations in hospitals tend to be lengthy or lack the desired results. In addressing the question, how can lean be implemented effectively in a hospital-wide setting, this paper aims to examine two opposing approaches.

The authors studied two Dutch university hospitals which engaged in different lean implementation approaches during the same four-year period: top-down vs bottom-up. Inductive qualitative analyses were made of 49 interviews; numerous documents; field notes; 13 frontline meeting observations; and objective hospital performance data. Longitudinally, the authors depict how the sequential events unfolded in both hospitals.

During the six implementation stages, the roles played by top, middle and frontline managers stood out. While the top managers of one hospital initiated the organization-wide implementation and then delegated it to others, the top managers of the other similar hospital merely tolerated the bottom-up lean activities. Eventually, only the hospital with the top-down approach achieved high organization-wide performance gains, but only in its fourth year after the top managers embraced lean in their own daily work practices and had started to co-create lean themselves. Then, the earlier developed lean infrastructure at the middle- and frontline ranks led to the desired hospital-wide lean implementation results.

Change-management insights, including basic tenets of social learning and goal-setting theory, are shown to advance the knowledge of effective lean implementation in hospitals. The authors found lean implementation “best-oiled” through role-modeling by top managers who use a phase-based process and engage in close cross-hierarchical or co-creative collaboration with middle and frontline managerial members.

The purpose of this paper is to examine leadership behaviors associated with lean healthcare (LH) implementation and how they develop throughout the change process.

After a systematic literature review of 107 peer-reviewed articles on lean leaders’ behaviors, the authors undertook a one-year mixed-methods study of 12 leaders within a Brazilian public hospital undergoing LH implementation. Multivariate data analysis techniques were employed.

The literature review showed some convergence between effective lean leader behaviors in both manufacturing and healthcare work settings, implying that lean leaders’ behaviors are generalizable to other contexts than manufacturing. The empirical findings suggest that LH implementation needs leaders to demonstrate a set of task-oriented behaviors, especially if short-term results are mandatory. More mature lean leaders should also continue developing their relations-oriented behaviors.

While the contingency theory assumes that contexts influence (lean) practices adoption, leadership behaviors may not be bound to the work context. The finding resembles the augmentation effect of leadership whereby more mature lean leaders adopt both task- and relations-oriented behaviors.

Longitudinal studies in this field are scarce, regardless of the industrial setting. Many manufacturing and healthcare organizations crave for knowledge about lean leader behaviors throughout the lean implementation journey in order to enhance the effectiveness of their often-struggling lean initiatives. The insights derived from this study could help organizations to adjust their expectations as well as identify behavioral gaps and needs in terms of soft skills development among their leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating role of Industry 4.0 technologies on the relationship between lean production (LP) and operational performance improvement within Brazil, a developing economy context.

One representative from each of the 147 studied manufacturing companies filled in a survey on three internally related lean practice bundles and two Industry 4.0 technology bundles, with safety, delivery, quality, productivity and inventory as performance indicators. As this study was grounded on the contingency theory, multivariate data analyses were performed, controlling for four contingencies.

Industry 4.0 moderates the effect of LP practices on operational performance improvement, but in different directions. Process-related technologies negatively moderate the effect of low setup practices on performance, whereas product/service-related technologies positively moderate the effect of flow practices on performance.

With the advent of Industry 4.0, companies have been channelling their efforts to achieve superior performance by advancing levels of automation and interconnectivity. Eventually, widespread and proven manufacturing approaches, like LP, will integrate such technologies which may, in turn, impair or favour operational performance. Contrary to previous studies, the contingencies appeared to have a less extensive effect. The authors point to various options for further study across different socio-economic contexts. This study evidenced that purely technological adoption will not lead to distinguished results. LP practices help in the installation of organisational habits and mindsets that favour systemic process improvements, supporting the design and control of manufacturers’ operations management towards the fourth industrial revolution era.