Factors influencing employee perceptions in lean transformations

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate employee perceptions during a lean transformation 1 . The combination of case study and survey methodologies was used to define elements influencing the perceived lean success of shop floor employees. According to our findings, belief, commitment, work method and communication all have a considerable direct impact on workers' perceptions of lean success. However, their effects are very different based on the scope and focus of changes that is influenced by process characteristics. Perceptions regarding successful lean transformation during a moderate reorganisation of the company's welding plant, where mainly males work, are affected only by commitment and work method, whereas the deep reorganisation of the sewing plant (populated by female employees) is only influenced by belief and communication.Keywords: lean transformation; worker perceptions; gender; work environment 1 The contribution of the authors is 60%/35%/5%, respectively. 3 1.Introduction The fierce competition in the automotive industry forces companies at all levels of the supply chain to seek more effective operations. Recent decades have proven with certainty that the best "path" to pursue is Toyota's lean strategy. Lean production, first described in detail by Womack, Jones and Roos (1990) in their revolutionary book, "The Machine that Changed the World", has its roots in the Toyota Production System (TPS) (Ohno, 1988). Today, lean manufacturing is a complex system that extends throughout a company and beyond its borders (Hines et al., 2004;Matsui, 2007; Warnecke and Hüser, 1995;Womack and Jones, 2003). Lean production is standard in the global automotive industry and is gaining ground in other manufacturing sectors (Abdulmalek and Rajgopal, 2007;Panizzolo, 1998) and even service industries (Womack and Jones, 2003).Achieving lean production is a long and practically constant process during which the participants must continuously manage (Karlsson and Ahlström, 1996) and undergo changes. Its implementation is accompanied by radical changes from the beginning. These changes have a remarkable impact on performance (e.g., lead time, quality) and also substantially affect stakeholders (e.g., managers, workers) (Womack et al., 1990). Assessments of the success of change processes (i.e., lean implementation) are usually restricted to measuring operational and financial performance. What employees actually perceive, think and feel about lean implementation, the human aspect, has received less attention.In this paper, we explore 'soft' building blocks (e.g., commitment, belief) of successful lean implementation on the shop floor level. To determine how things happen in real company settings and to provide a genuine explanation of contingency factors, decisions and behaviors, we used a combined methodology including a case study and a survey at a Hungarian-owned automotive parts supplier. Our objective is to determine which factors make workers feel that lean transformation was successful in order to r...

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