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The paper aims at investigating whether and how the product designation of origin (PDO) label influences consumers' acceptance, attributes' perception and purchase intention of PDO foods.

The study employs an experimental lab study based on the affective test of acceptance methodology with a nine-point hedonic scale. Three PDO foods are compared with similar non-PDO samples concerning cheese, cured ham and olive oil categories.

The presence of PDO labels enhances the consumers' acceptance as well as their perception of sensory attributes. A critical role of the brand name as an enhancer of consumer acceptance also emerges, highlighting the relationship between brand-name and PDO label.

The main limitation is related to the lab study methodology, which employs a small number of participants and occurs far from a “normal” situation of consumption. The acceptance test, moreover, does not provide explanations about motives underlying the differences in consumers' perception and preferences.

Practical implications are suggested for food companies concerning the management of both PDO labels and brand strategies and the product's properties that could improve the sensory perception of consumers and their overall product's acceptance.

The study contributes to the debate on consumer behaviour towards PDO foods by adding evidence about the positive influence of such a certification on individual preferences on the basis of a sensory methodology that has been little employed for studying the domain of product certifications.

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.