Desirée Hermina van Dun

Lean-team effectiveness through leader values and members’ informing

Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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. Research limitations/implications Future research must compare the content of effective lean-team values and behaviors to similar non-lean teams. Practical implications Appoint lean-team leaders with predominantly self-transcendence rather than conservation values: to promote work-floor sharing of information and lean-team effectiveness. Originality/value Human factors associated with effective lean-teams were examined, thereby importing organization-behavioral insights into the operations management literature: with HRM-type implications.

Improving lean team performance: leadership and workfloor dynamics

This Ph.D. thesis reports four different studies that were undertaken to identify and examine the content of human dynamics that may account for sustainable lean team performance, at multiple organizational levels: higher-level leaders (including top- and middle managers), team leaders, and team members. The thesis emphasizes human work values and behaviors, also because an Organizational Behavior focus was called for in the advancement of lean Operations Management, and work values are seen as important underlying determinants of (lean) work behavior. While effective lean teams are often regarded as self-managed work teams, we found that top or higher-level managers play key roles in training and developing lean team members and their leaders. Managers showcase their desired behavioral patterns to their followers by exemplary role modeling relations-oriented behavior, and airing their self-transcendence and openness-to-change type values. In this way, higher-leader behavior is cascaded to the lowest organizational level, so that each workfloor member is focused on and committed to achieving optimal customer value through continuous process improvement. Also higher-level managers’ guidance and clarity in terms of organizational strategy and structure, as well as aligned investment in lean and people development, is shown to facilitate lean team performance. In other words, despite frequent calls to simply “scrap” middle management, a remark often heard on workfloors during initial attempts to implement lean, if such managers are good at translating organizational strategy to their (lean) teams, they will not become obsolete. These insights may guide managers who envision a lean transformation on their workfloors. Also those who advise lean teams and their leaders may direct their interventions more at leader-behavioral development, instead of merely “rolling out” a predetermined set of lean tools such as Value Stream Mapping, 5S, or Kanban. Such leader coaching could take place on the basis of mapping personal-value constellations (e.g., through a card sorting technique used in chapter II of the dissertation) and subsequent reflecting upon how their own values influence their own behaviors. Furthermore, those who select, train, and promote leaders may feel the need to enrich their leader profiles with the values and behaviors reported in the dissertation.