Track: Lean

Abstract

Regardless the kind of organization, a successful lean manufacturing (LM) implementation is highly dependent on its people, both leaders and followers. Hence, the way leaders act and behave influence the attitudes and behaviors of the followers, setting the predominant culture within the organization undergoing a lean implementation. This article aims at identifying the leadership styles and contextual variables that best support companies undergoing a LM implementation. To achieve that we apply a clustering method that combines information gathered from a survey carried out with 68 leaders from different companies with different levels of lean implementation. Our approach identifies leadership styles that may contribute to the level of lean practices adoption considering specific contextual variables of the leadership such as age, experience and size of team. We argue that, viewed as an evolutionary process, there is more than one best way to lead teams that are implementing lean. Further, we state that leadership contextual variables are associated with leadership behaviors and the level of LM implementation, indicating that the expected relationship between leaders’ styles and LM implementation may not be as suggested in the existing literature.