Pandemic's effect on the relationship between lean implementation and service performance

PurposeThis 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.Design/methodology/approachThe 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.FindingsThe 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.Originality/valueSince 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.

Exploring lean generic and lean healthcare cultural clusters

Purpose Lean culture has been noted to be an underdeveloped concept. The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of Lean culture by determining its leading cultural clusters. Design/methodology/approach Content analysis was used to perform top relevant keywords exploration and qualitative analysis on main text of 33 reference books, 21 Lean generic and 12 Lean healthcare, consolidated as three cases (Lean general, Lean Liker et al. and Lean healthcare). Findings Four emergent Lean’s leading cultural clusters: operations, change, collectivity and humanity were identified inductively from ten 10 relevant keywords, namely, in order of importance: work, time, process, Lean, system, improvement, production, patient, people and team. Saliency of the word “time” is noteworthy. Cross-validation of these cultural clusters is demonstrated through sociotechnical systems theory. Research limitations/implications Content analysis is shown to be an effective research method enabling inductive analysis. Identification of four leading clusters should support productive further research on Lean culture. Practical implications The four cultural clusters indicate to healthcare and other domains managers, who wish to improve their Lean cultural transformation success rate, to focus their attention to what their organization actually does (operations), to how improvement happens (change) and to how everything (collectivity) and everyone (humanity) work together in their organization. Originality/value This work applies innovative content analysis on Lean reference books. It highlights the importance of time as an underappreciated Lean culture element. It provides evidence and additional support for link between Lean and sociotechnical systems theory.

Does IS0 9001 quality management system support product innovation? An analysis from the sociotechnical systems theory

Purpose Building on the sociotechnical systems theory (STS), the purpose of this paper is to investigate the direct impacts of the social and technical QMs (ISO 9001) practices on both incremental and radical product innovation and the direct relationships relaying QMs (ISO 9001) as a sociotechnical system with incremental and radical product innovation. Design/methodology/approach The paper opted for a survey instrument to collect quantitative data from 82 Moroccan certified ISO 9001 firm. A partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the research hypotheses. Findings Results show that the social and technical QMs (ISO 9001) practices do not have a significant relationship with incremental and radical product innovation when they are taken in isolation. However, when ranged together to constitute a whole sociotechnical system of QMs (ISO 9001), QMs (ISO 9001) prove to have a strong positive and significant impact on incremental product innovation and a weak positive and significant impact on radical product innovation. Research limitations/implications Because of the small sample size that might weaken the significance of the results and the use of cross-sectional data, this research may lack a large statistical generalizability vis-à-vis the analytical generalization. Practical implications The results provide useful implications for managers, suggesting that in order to develop their product innovation, they must ensure that both QMs (ISO 9001) social and technical practices achieve a high level of integration without allowing some quality practices to take over. Originality/value Based on the STS, this study is the first to focus primarily on the role of the multi-dimensional structure of QMs (ISO 9001), i.e. social and technical practices, in incremental and radical product innovation.

The Organization Theories of the Industrial Democracy Experiments Meet Contemporary Organizational Realities

The Scandinavian industrial democracy experiments (IDEs) contained elements of organization theories, based particularly on sociotechnical systems theory (STS). In this paper, we provide an introduction to some main points of these theories and their aftermath, as a context for the six papers of the special issue on the relevance of the organization theories of the IDE for contempo- rary organizational realities.The six papers are also summarized and positioned in relation to the theoretical insights from the IDE.