Academic literature on Lean Manufacturing (LM) is widely available. However, due to its fragmentation, the contribution of LM from practical and academic perspectives is controversial. This paper e...

Practical implications and future research agenda of lean manufacturing: a systematic literature review

This paper aims to provide a synthesis of the results of the previous literature on leadership behaviours that enable successful Lean Six Sigma implementation.,The published literature that relates to leadership and Lean Six Sigma has been included. A thematic analysis was conducted on the previous literature which helped in identifying the relevant aspects and associating the behaviours with specific aspects.,After analysing the literature, seven key aspects have emerged: communication, culture of continuous improvement, coaching and developing employees, creating vision and aligning goals, employee motivation, employee empowerment and leadership commitment and support. The main leadership behaviours that facilitate and support Lean Six Sigma implementation have been summarised.,Thematic analysis in this field is scarce, so identifying the leadership behaviours’ themes can help researchers in developing a framework of leadership behaviours. Organisations and practitioners of Lean Six Sigma can take into consideration these behaviours as a key to the successful implementation of Lean Six Sigma. They can adjust their behaviours and know the behaviours that need to be developed amongst leaders. This would facilitate the Lean Six Sigma journey by overcoming the challenges that face practitioners during Lean Six Sigma implementation.

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Critical success factors of Lean Six Sigma from leaders’ perspective

Lean philosophy has been one of the most prominent methodologies of process improvement. Positive results from lean implementations have motivated managers to carry out lean transformations. However, the low success rates, linked to barriers to implement lean are still a challenge, and one of the reasons is the lack of understanding of these inhibitors and enablers. Scholars have investigated barriers that affect the lean journey, some of these barriers overlap and require a meaningful categorisation. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to fill in this gap by providing a review of more than 20 years of literature, and synthesising these barriers into meaningful organisational categories. To achieve this aim, we employed a systematic literature review. Our findings present six meaningful lean barriers, which we categorised into a framework. These barriers have mainly behavioural and organisational aspects (people-dependent), and technical aspects (tool-based). Finally, we derived eight propositions, contributing to knowledge and practice.

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Meaningful inhibitors of the lean journey: a systematic review and categorisation of over 20 years of literature

Purpose 
The purpose of this paper is to explore the interface between Lean strategy and organisational transformation, by scrutinising the literature on why Lean strategies fail to be implemented and/or sustained. 
Design/methodology/approach 
As a conceptual and research paper it develops a hypothesis. It encompasses philosophical discussions and comparative studies of others' work and Lean thinking alongside its links to the principles, ideology, philosophy and the underpinning values. The search involved a total of 1,931 articles spanning across 75 different journals. The content analysis approach suggested by Mayring (2004) was selected. 
Findings 
Successfully implementing Lean is more complex than often recognized within literature and the alignment between strategy and organisational transformation is repeatedly not undertaken. The investigation indicates policy makers need to view Lean as an ideology and not simply another process. 
Research limitations/implications 
This paper addresses the inaccurate representation which exists of the concept of Lean as a strategy. Whilst a major evolution has occurred comprising the inputs 
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perceived as imperative for Lean success, a translucent empathy of its philosophy alongside an acknowledgement of the magnitude of the change and transformation necessary has been comparatively perplexing. 
This paper has implications for academic scholars of strategy and organisational change as well as for practitioners seeking to implement organisational change. 
Originality/value 
Empirical evidence suggests that most Lean strategies struggle. Customers are becoming more demanding, markets are becoming more customised, and product life-cycles getting shorter are dictating that Lean needs to be embraced as an ideology.

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Sustaining a lean ideology

The objective of this review is to identify the most effective characteristics of leaders to enable lean implementation, and helps the organization to improve or change their already implemented strategies to enhance performance through lean. The litreture aim to measure the leadership style for implementation of lean contributes towards building behaviors of leaders that supports the change process like lean. The methodology contains peer reviewed journal, which uncovered 67 reviewed articles from 2003-2017. The conclusion after review explore that senior management and human resources must support and operationalized such opportunity of development. The development is purposed to enable lean implementation. The proper implementation of leadership behaviors improved the success of lean system and validates to achieve high sustainability in performance.

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The Chronological studies of lean and leadership for improvement of organizational performance

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the role that leadership plays in the success of Lean management (LM) implementation, by trying to identify what is the impact of the transactional, transformational, directive and empowering leadership styles on the success of such an implementation in Portuguese companies, and what are the most important leaders’ attributes.,An on-line questionnaire was distributed to 65 manufacturing and services Portuguese organizations that have implemented LM.,The results suggest that the empowering leadership style has a positive impact on the success of LM implementation. Even though results do not allow concluding about the impact of the other styles, several leader’s attributes were identified as having influence: individualized consideration, information sharing, skill development, intellectual stimulation, assigned goals and self-directed decision making.,Very few studies have addressed the role of leadership in the success of adopting LM and, to the best knowledge, only one paper studied the critical attributes of leaders in LM implementation. Moreover, the present study focuses in Portugal, country where this topic has rarely been investigated.

Daniela Maria da Costa Nogueira

Papers

The relationship between leadership style and the success of Lean management implementation