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Lean office covers the improvement of administrative processes and information flows. In offices, one of the essential challenges is to coordinate the development of information management capabilities. Thus, this paper aims to identify the key factors of information management in lean office deployment contexts.

By adopting a qualitative approach, it consists of theoretical research that applies grounded theory's coding technique and exploits 27 scientific studies on lean office published in the past 20 years.

It identifies five key factors for managing information into an organizational structure that optimizes information flow, such as “information-seeking,” “access to information,” “information quality,” “information processing” and “use of information and communication technology”.

Data analysis was restricted in scientific research regarding lean office deployment. Therefore, the accuracy of the concepts and categories of information management proposed in this paper can be adjusted and validated in future research, thus deepening the discussion of its findings.

It highlights issues for managing information in contemporary organizations such as failures in information retrieval, restrictions on access to information, lack of quality information, inadequate information processing criteria and inefficiency of information systems infrastructure.

It analyzes the lean office deployment from the theoretical framework of information management. Thus, it differs from other studies in this field because it is not limited to the operational aspects of lean management. Nevertheless, it shows that lean office reconfigures information flows and continually improves organizations’ strategic management.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how Lean office planning and implementation take place in a Brazilian regulatory agency and to investigate the adjustments needed for its implementation.

A longitudinal case study was conducted. Interview was the main source of evidence. Between September and October 2012, data about the planning phase were collected; between April and May 2015, Lean office implementation was investigated. Altogether, five employees of the agency were interviewed.

The agency assumed its mission as value for the user, establishing control process, evaluating and improving processes to achieve perfection and recognising its weakness in a continuous improvement culture. Planning and implementation of Lean office in the regulatory agency followed the main recommendations in the literature. However, adjustments were necessary in accordance with the particularities of the public institution.

Owing to the nature of this study, no generalisation was possible. Moreover, interviews with managers were about both Lean planning, which has taken place in the past, and Lean implementing, which is still running; thus, some information may be abstruse.

It was possible to list the main adjustments needed for planning and implementing the Lean office in the public agency and some are applicable for other public administration bodies.

Lean office studies are mainly related to private organizations, but this paper demonstrates that their fundamentals are preserved in public service, and thus it proved that Lean thinking may be applied to the public administration. It also raised a series of questions for future studies.

The concept of Lean office design has emerged, claiming to support an efficient labour process. This article aims to investigate how the two main perspectives identified in the Lean office: the neo-Tayloristic approach and the team-based approach, based in different historical backgrounds, use the office design to shorten lead time and free up time.

An extensive review is done in the article of what the Lean office concept means for different research areas and to practitioners.

The study presents the two Lean office perspectives in relation to each other, something that has not been done before since it is only recently the team-based Lean office was introduced. The study also presents possible risk and benefits of two perspectives from an employee and organizational perspective.

Since this is a first exploratory review of the Lean office concept based on theories and examples from design practice, further empirical studies are needed to determine risks and benefits of the concept.

The clarifying examples in the article make it useful for people involved in the design and building process of offices.

The article brings together the fields of labour process, office research and facility management with the design practice and presents the two perspectives Lean office design in relation to each other, which has not been done before since the team-based Lean office has only recently been introduced.

In organizational contexts, learning fosters the creation of knowledge at the individual and collective levels. In Lean Office, processes are customer oriented through continuous improvement and elimination of waste. In addition, Lean Office can promote changes in the corporate environment and drive organizational learning. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze the Lean Office factors that contribute to the organizational learning.

The method consists in a qualitative analysis of researches on Lean Office carried out in Brazil, based on the theoretical framework for analyzing organizational learning proposed by Argote and Miron-Spektor (2011). This framework defends the relevance of context and experience in knowledge conversion processes in organizations.

The study shows that Lean Office provides benefits for the learning process through Work Cells, Value Stream Mapping and Continuous Improvement. The effects of Lean Office are present in the organizational context, culture and behaviors, attitudes and skills of individuals.

This study brings for academics a discussion on Lean Office from the standpoint of elements pertaining to the organizational learning process. In this aspect, the study proposes treating the topic at a strategy level, striving to break out of the research boundaries that limit their scope to their operational results. For practitioners, the study introduces Lean Office factors that add positive results to the organizational learning process.

The paper presents a reflection of Lean Office in the field of organizational learning. In addition to the elimination of waste, the study investigates other functions in which Lean initiatives play a role, such as providing solutions for organizational problems and creating favorable learning contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to present management techniques in the healthcare sector through lean office.

A case study approach is adopted, with data collected in the Brazilian military organization.

The findings identify several ways to apply lean concepts outside manufacturing. From this, a future lean office health state design will be proposed.

The lean office health proposal has to be tested in other organizations to confirm this case study. While this may limit the generalization of the findings, there is value in demonstrating the benefits modern lean office techniques can bring to the developing world healthcare.

The paper shows that lean office health techniques can provide benefits to healthcare in developing countries' hospitals and others.

The value of the paper arises from providing a detailed analysis of a healthcare lean office in the developing world. There have been only a small number of other studies published in the literature about lean office health.

This paper aims at examining the impact that COVID-19 pandemic and its related work implications have on the relationship between lean implementation and service performance.

The author surveyed service organizations that have been implementing lean for at least two years and remotely maintained their activities during the COVID-19 outbreak. Multivariate data techniques were applied to analyze the dataset. This study was grounded on sociotechnical systems theory.

The findings indicate that organizations that have been implementing lean services more extensively are also more likely to benefit from the effects that the COVID-19 had on work environments, especially in the case of home office. Nevertheless, social distancing does not appear to mediate the effects of lean services on both quality and delivery performances.

Since the pandemic is a recent phenomenon with unprecedented effects, this research is an initial effort to determine the effect the pandemic has on lean implementation and services' performance, providing both theoretical and practical contributions to the field.

Application of operations management in healthcare is particularly promising to improve the overall organisational performance, although the Italian system is behind in introducing related techniques and methods. One of the recent experiments in healthcare is the implementation of “Lean Thinking”. The purpose of this paper is to investigate which exogenous forces are driving knowledge transfer on Lean, both in the private and public healthcare sectors.

Informed by institutional sociology (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991), the paper builds on the case study methodology (Yin, 2013) to elucidate the environmental pressures that are encouraging the adoption of Lean thinking by Italian hospitals and Local Health Authorities.

The study highlights the economic, coercive, mimetic and normative pressures that are triggering the adoption of Lean thinking in the Italian National Health System (INHS). At the same time, the authors reveal the pivotal importance and innovative roles played by diverse prominent key-actors in the different organisations investigated.

Considering that little is known to date regarding which exogenous forces are driving the transfer of knowledge on Lean, especially in the public healthcare sector, the paper allows scholars to focus on patterns of isomorphic change and will facilitate managers and policy makers to understand exogenous factors stimulating the transfer of Lean thinking and the subsequent innovation within health organisations and systems.

Frontline teams are at the centre of lean transformations, but the teams also transform as they implement lean. This study examines these changes and seeks to understand how lean relates to team psychological safety and learning.

This research setting is the Romanian division of a leading European energy company. The authors collected team-level audit and survey data, which the authors used to test the effect of lean implementation on team psychological safety and learning. The authors’ team-level data are complemented with qualitative interviews conducted with team members and headquarters leaders.

The results of the regression analyses show that leanness is positively associated with team psychological safety, which is in turn positively associated with learning. Thus, this research provides evidence that leanness – mediated by team psychological safety – increases team learning.

Lean changes team dynamics and learning positively by ensuring and promoting an emotionally sound work environment with clear team structures, an appropriate level of autonomy, and strong leadership.

This paper contributes evidence of important psychological mechanisms that characterise team-level lean implementation. Particularly, the authors highlight how team psychological safety mediates the relationship between leanness and team learning.

Although leadership in lean systems is influenced by context, the mechanisms linking contextual factors (CFs) to leadership have not been explored. This study aims to present a framework for analyzing how context influences lean leadership competencies (LLCs).

The framework’s design was based on insights from literature and refined through an empirical study of a large manufacturing plant formally committed to lean. The evolution of CFs over time was monitored in this study, allowing for analyzing how these triggered the need for using LLCs.

The framework proved to be useful for as follows: the assessment of LLCs in different hierarchical levels; the analysis of how CFs and LLCs interact in specific “leadership events”; and the identification of improvement opportunities for supporting leadership. Four design propositions emerged from the empirical study, offering complimentary guidance for using the framework.

The framework was tested in one company, and therefore generalizations about its effectiveness need further applications.

The framework may be used fully or partly by practitioners. For instance, the assessment of LLCs can be used as a standalone tool according to the specific needs of practitioners. Also, by producing rich descriptions of LLCs and CFs, the framework may inform lean leadership development programs.

The framework allows for a systematic analysis of how a broad range of CFs influence LLCs, thus operationalizing an idea that so far has been discussed mostly on a theoretical level.

Lean manufacturing (LM) has advocated gains by reducing waste and intensifying continuous improvement. As a holistic organizational policy, it must overpass the limits of the manufacturing function. Management accounting should be aligned to lean thinking, aiming to meet the demands and goals of a lean organization. This paper aims to investigate the degree of alignment between management accounting systems and LM practices.

Two representative case studies were carried out in industry leaders in the implementation of LM, in Brazil. The key research constructs and were identified by means of a systematic literature review. The rhetoric and practice concerning the alignment between management accounting and LM are discussed based on the existing theory and the conducted case studies.

The analysis showed that many of the principles that form the rhetoric of lean accounting are far from the accounting practices observed in the companies. Using the theory-building function of case studies, 10 propositions to be tested in future research are proposed. The main propositions are also summarized in a framework based on analogies with optical lenses.

To the best of the knowledge, there are no previous in-depth studies focusing on characterizing this alignment between management accounting and LM practices. The analysis yields prescriptive directions for managers that seek to improve this alignment in their business. This study also proposes a five-stage maturity model, which can be used by the managers to assess this alignment and to set goals for reaching more advanced levels of maturity.