Exploring the dark side of Lean: a systematic review of the lean factors that influence social outcomes

Abstract

PurposeLean has shifted over the years from a set of tools to implement to a human-centric approach concerning both hard and soft factors. However, there is a limited research on these soft factors and how they influence companies performance and social outcomes on the one hand and how they enable the hard factors on the other hand. Taking this as a valuable opportunity, the purpose of this paper is to present the key motivating factors and key gaps in the literature as an agenda for future research.Design/methodology/approachA systematic methodology to identifying the literature on social outcomes and factors in Lean is presented. Web of Science, EBSCO, Emerald, Science Direct, Google Scholar and the top journals were searched, and 158 papers were identified.FindingsThe systematic review helped the authors to identify the evolution, current trends, research gaps and an agenda for future research for exploring social outcomes in Lean and the factors mediating them. These factors are grouped and presented.Practical implicationsThe implications of this work include understanding for managers and professionals how both soft and hard factors in Lean are related and that for a sustainable implementation, the whole system must be observed. This work could serve as a valuable resource that depending on the execution of Lean, either positive outcomes will emerge or even negative outcomes, referred to as “The Dark Side”.Originality/valueThis paper presents an extended survey on the factors in Lean mediating both companies’ performance and social outcomes. The authors also believe that this is possibly the most comprehensive systematic literature review on the topic and will set the foundation for various research avenues based on the key findings of this study.

Multisensory analysis and wine marketing: systematic review and perspectives

“…In order to carry out this review, we used three scientific databases: Science Direct, Emerald and Web of Science (considered also by Garavand et al, 2016;Salentijn et al, 2021;Shaharudin et al, 2019) which were chosen because they provide a wide variety of articles and include relevant and prestigious journals. The research was conducted by using the following strings: "wine," "senses," "sensory marketing," "multisensory," "cross-modality."…”

Exploring the influence of lean manufacturing practices on employee social sustainability

“…multifunctional workers), so it is expected a closer relationship with ESS dimensions. Nevertheless, lean manufacturing is a socio-technical system (Shah and Ward, 2007) in which hard (technical) and soft (social) practices should interact to enable a successful implementation (Gaiardelli et al , 2019; Salentijn et al , 2021). Given this interaction, either hard or soft lean practices are potentially relevant to ESS dimensions.…”

“…Besides using the links found in our literature review (Table 1), we incorporated the other potential connections between these two groups of variables. The inclusion of other possible relationships is justified by two arguments: the aforementioned exploratory characteristic of this study, given the incipient stage of the lean–ESS research and the evidence from the literature that both hard and soft lean practices may influence social outcomes (Gaiardelli et al , 2019; Salentijn et al , 2021). Furthermore, by addressing potential linkages that are not supported by the literature so far, this study can contribute to fomenting the understanding of the influence of these practices on shop-floor employee social outcomes.…”

“…In contrast, studies investigating the relationship between lean manufacturing and social sustainability are still scarce, despite being considered a fertile field of study by recent research (Bhattacharya et al , 2019; Henao et al , 2019) and having workers pointed as a crucial component for improvements in a lean environment (Wong and Wong, 2014). Moreover, a rather limited number of papers investigate the influence of lean manufacturing practices on ESS (Bhattacharya et al , 2019; Cherrafi et al , 2016), leaving literature with a still narrow and often controversial body of knowledge regarding how these practices affect employee social outcomes (Camuffo et al , 2017; Salentijn et al , 2021).…”

A conceptual framework for a systemic understanding of barriers during lean implementation

“…On the one hand, the number of lean implementations is growing, while on the other, researchers find that less than two-thirds of lean implementations are found to be successful and even lesser are sustainable (Leite et al , 2020b). Consequently, multiple studies have emerged which focus on the barriers of lean in various domains (Salentijn et al , 2021), including construction (Albalkhy and Sweis, 2020), manufacturing (Vinodh, 2020), furniture (Abu et al , 2019), small and medium enterprises (SMEs) (Yadav et al , 2019), healthcare (Escuder et al , 2018), mining (Khaba and Bhar, 2018a) and shipbuilding (Lai et al , 2020), among others. However, one of the limitations in these studies is their inability to provide a theoretical understanding of the barriers, which has been attempted in this study.…”