The soft side of lean management: how organisation'culture hampers a successful lean implementation

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2020-07-16
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en
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Abstract
After many years, lean management, or simply lean, is still one of the most used methods in certain sectors. Lean management is described as a method that focuses on reducing resources, avoiding waste, and creating value for the customer. Even though there is broad knowledge about lean management, only a few organisations have been able to successfully implement lean management and preserve them it the long term. Based on a review of existing literature, it was concluded that a holistic view regarding lean management was lacking. Studies have often written about the hard aspect of lean management, leading to the soft aspects seem being under-researched. This could be a possible explanation of why many organisations still fail to complete lean implementations, which is what aroused the interest of the researcher in this topic. Subsequently, several studies indicated the critical role of the soft side of LM and further research was necessary. Hence, this study is focused on the role of the soft aspects, in particular organisational culture, and how these soft aspects hampers the implementation process. Therefore, the following research question is central in this study: ‘How does an organisation’s culture hamper successful implementations of Lean Management?’. To answer the research question, a qualitative case study is conducted. The case study was carried out at the family logistics business Royal Rotra to investigate how the organisational culture influenced the implementation process, and therefore the successful adaptation of LM. This was done by executing 27 semi-structured interviews. The results could not provide an unambiguous answer to the research question because organisational culture is a multi-dimension concept, which means that the organisational culture influenced the implementation in different ways. However, the findings showed that organisational culture has both a positive as well as negative influence on the implementation process, which showed the significant role of an organisation’s culture on a lean an implementation process of lean. One of the main findings is that the organisational culture has a major impact on the employee’s willingness to change. For example, a closed and controlling negative effect the employee’s willing to change. The most striking finding is that a third concept is found a third, namely organisational structure, which has a main role in how the current structure is formed.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen
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