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The purpose of the study is to develop knowledge on the implementation of Hoshin Kanri (HK) in small manufacturing companies. Two research questions are addressed: (1) what factors influence the implementation of HK in small manufacturing companies? (2) How do the factors influence the implementation of HK in small manufacturing companies?

The research presented in this paper is based on an extensive literature review and data from the implementation process in five small manufacturing companies. In the literature review, factors influencing the implementation of HK, lean production and total quality management (TQM) in small manufacturing firms are identified. Thereafter, five implementation cases are analyzed. Findings from the cases are then contrasted with the factors identified in the literature and further theorized.

Seven factors were found to either enable or hamper HK implementation in small manufacturing companies. Management involvement was identified as a critical factor. Management involvement can be typologized as collaborative or demanding, and the types of involvement is decisive in implementation processes within the small manufacturing company context.

In this paper, the authors focus on small manufacturing companies as the starting point and relate theoretical and practical results to the implementation processes in this defined target group. Conceptualizing implementation as a learning process, this research contributes to this emerging perspective on small firm development.

As part of a national plan to govern professional and organizational development in Norwegian specialist healthcare, the country’s hospital clinics are tasked with constructing development plans. Using the development plan as a case, the paper analyzes how managers navigate and legitimize the planning process among central actors and deals with the contingency of decisions in such strategy work.

This study applies a qualitative research design using a case study method. The material consists of public documents, observations and single interviews, covering the process of constructing a development plan at the clinical level.

The findings suggest that the development plan was shaped through a multilevel translation process consisting of different contending rationalities. At the clinical level, the management had difficulties in legitimizing the process. The underlying tension between top-down and bottom-up steering challenged involvement and made it difficult to manage the contingency of decisions.

The findings are relevant to public sector managers working on strategy documents and policymakers identifying challenges that might hinder the fulfillment of political intentions.

This paper draws on a case from Norway; however, the findings are of general interest. The study contributes to the academic discussion on how to consider both the health authorities’ perspective and the organizational perspective to understand the manager’s role in handling the contingency of decisions and managing paradoxes in the decision-making process.

The purpose of this paper is to address gaps in the knowledge about human resource (HR) professional involvement in strategic decision-making in China compared with that in Australia.

First, the authors compare the strategic involvement of Chinese and Australian HR professionals. Second, based on the upper echelon theory, the authors compare the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) and top management team (TMT) between both countries on HR involvement in strategic decision-making. Data were collected from matched pairs of HR and TMT executives in China (n = 168) and in Australia (n = 102).

Results indicate a difference, despite of no statistical significance, in HR involvement in strategic decision-making between Chinese and Australian samples. TMT behavioural integration was positively related to HR involvement in strategic decision-making in a collectivistic culture (i.e. in China), but not in an individualistic culture (i.e. in Australia). However, CEO support for HRM was positively related to HR involvement in strategic decision-making in Australia, whereas it is not related in China.

The paper conducts a comparative study and practical, and research implications are discussed at the end.

This study aims to deepen the understanding of how top managers reason about handling the relationships between quality of patient care, economy and professionals’ engagement.

Qualitative design. Individual in-depth interviews with all members of the executive management team at an emergency hospital in Norway were analysed using reflexive thematic method.

The top managers had the intention to balance between quality of patient care, economy and professionals’ engagement. This became increasingly difficult in times of high internal or external pressures. Then top management acted as if economy was the most important focus.

For health-care top managers to lead the pursuit towards increased sustainability in health care, there is a need to balance between quality of patient care, economy and professionals’ engagement. This study shows that this balancing act is not an anomaly top-managers can eradicate. Instead, they need to recognize, accept and deliberately act with that in mind, which can create virtuous development spirals where managers and health-professional communicate and collaborate, benefitting quality of patient care, economy and professionals’ engagement. However, this study builds on a limited number of participants. More research is needed.

Sustainable health care needs to balance quality of patient care and economy while at the same time ensure professionals’ engagement. Even though this is a central leadership task for managers at all levels, there is limited knowledge about how top managers reason about this.

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 report on research into the impact of two sequential dimensions of strategic purchasing – purchasing recognition and purchasing involvement – on the development and deployment of dynamic capabilities. The authors also examine how such dynamic capabilities impact on both cost and innovation performance, and how their effects differ for service as opposed to manufacturing firms.

The authors test hypotheses using structural equation modeling of survey data from 309 manufacturing and service firms.

From a dynamic capability perspective, the analysis supports the positive relationships between purchasing recognition, purchasing involvement, and dynamic capability in the form of knowledge scanning. The authors also find support for the positive impact of knowledge scanning on both cost and innovation performance. From a contingency perspective, data supports hypothesized differences caused by industry, whereby service-based firms experience stronger positive linkages in our model than manufacturing-based firms. Finally, emerging from the data, the authors explore a re-enforcing effect from cost performance to purchasing involvement, something that is in line with the dynamic capabilities perspective but not typically addressed in operations management (OM) research.

The research offers a number of theoretical and managerial contributions, including being one of a relative few examples of empirical assessment of dynamic capability development and deployment; examining the enablers of dynamic capability in addition to the more commonly addressed performance effect; assessing the contingency effect of firm type for dynamic capabilities; and uncovering a return (re-enforcing) effect between performance and enablers of dynamic capabilities.

Drawing on the theoretical concept of organisational fit, this paper questions the relevance of employees' participation in the link between continuous improvement (CI) and operational performance. The literature has long emphasised that to be successful, CI implementation needs to rely on employees' involvement as soon as its inception. This paper argues that this approach is not generalisable.

Based on a database of 330 firms across 15 countries, regression analyses were used to hypothesise that the fit between CI and employee participation is positively associated with operational performance, and that the fit between CI and centralisation of authority is negatively associated with operational performance. The authors also ran a robustness check with polynomial regression analyses and the response surface methodology.

CI–employee participation fit is positively associated with operational performance, suggesting that there is less need for employees to be involved when a firm has scarcely developed CI. Employee participation becomes gradually more relevant as CI progresses. Moreover, the results demonstrate that the CI–centralisation of authority fit is negatively associated with operational performance, suggesting that a top-down management approach with centralised authority is preferable when CI is low, whereas a bottom-up management approach is helpful when a firm has extensively developed CI.

This research draws on the concept of organisational fit to explore the relationships between internal practices in the operations management literature. The authors suggest that managers should dynamically balance the practices of employee participation and centralisation of authority as CI improves. This study highlights that CI has different evolutionary levels that require different managerial approaches and practices.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of Six Sigma (SS) and the underlying dimensions of its critical success factors (CSF) via an analysis of the effects of top management support (TMS), implementation strategy (IS), and collaborative team (CT) on project performance (PP) in Mexican manufacturing companies.

Based on a SS literature review, a survey was conducted to capture practitioners’ viewpoints about CSFs for SS implementation and their impact on performance in manufacturing companies. A factor analysis and structural equation modeling were conducted in order to identify and analyze causal relationships.

The results suggest that CSFs grouped in the constructs TMS, IS, and CT have a positive impact on PP as measured by cost reduction, variation reduction, and quality improvement.

Although the empirical data collected supported the proposed model, results might differ among organizations in different countries. In addition, the study did not analyze a unique performance metric; instead, general PP dimensions were used.

Boosting the TMS, IS, and CT enhances positive PP of SS in manufacturing companies.

IS as a construct has not been studied exhaustively; this work contributes to a better understanding of it and its impact on PP. Additionally, studies of SS in Latin America are limited, so this study gives a complementary vision to practitioners and researchers about it.

This study adopts the dynamic capabilities perspective to analyze environmental performance in family firms and explores the moderating effects that both family involvement in the Top Management Team (TMT) and long-term orientation (LTO) exert on the relationship between dynamic capabilities and environmental performance.

The authors test the hypotheses on a database of 748 family tourism firms, using hierarchical regression analysis.

The authors' results show that both variables have a beneficial effect on building the dynamic capabilities to be applied to improving environmental performance. However, the moderating effect of family involvement is revealed to be more complex than that of LTO. Having a high degree of family managerial involvement positively moderates the effect of dynamic capabilities on environmental performance but only in family firms with highly-developed dynamic capabilities; conversely, in family firms with lower levels of dynamic capabilities not having this family involvement in the TMT is better.

This study helps advance the research on Spanish family tourism firms by adopting an approach that unveils the heterogeneity in dynamic capabilities among said firms, driven by the firms' idiosyncratic features in terms of family involvement in the TMT and their LTO. The article also provides practical insights for family business owners, managers and advisors and outlines important directions for future research.

Management and leadership in health care are described as complex and challenging, and the span of control is known to be a key component in the manager’s job demands. The implementation of change can be a challenge in health care, and managers often have roles as implementation leaders. Little attention has been given to how managers perceive the process of implementation. Thus, this study aims to explore second-line managers’ perceptions of, prerequisites for and experiences from the implementation of changes in their manager’s work conditions.

A grounded theory–based qualitative design was used. Data were collected from a purposive sample of nine second-line managers by individual semi-structured interviews. The three stages of initial coding, focus codes and axial coding were used in data analysis.

Three thematic areas were identified: engagement, facilitation and achievement. The second-line managers’ descriptions suggest that the change work entails a complex challenge with an unclear result. Involvement, consideration for the context and facilitation are needed to be able to conduct a cohesive implementation process.

This study findings outline that to succeed when implementing change in complex organizations, it is crucial that managers at different levels are involved in the entire process, and that there are prerequisites established for the facilitation and achievement of goals during the planning, implementation and follow-up.