Respect for People : Developing alternative understandings and relationships to ethics, leadership, and culture in Lean implementations

Abstract: Successful Lean implementation is a combination of both technology and culture, using bothkey principles of continuous improvement (CI) and respect for people (RFP). However, manyorganizations fail to implement Lean and critical factors in this failure are leadership, cultureand the lack of RFP. When CI and RFP permeate an organization, it is called real Lean, andwhen there is only a focus on CI it is called false Lean. Without Lean culture, where RFP playsthe main role, Lean becomes an add-on tool.The purpose of this thesis is twofold. The first part of the purpose is to developalternative understandings of RFP and relationships to ethics, leadership and culture in Leanimplementations. The second part is to suggest a normative framework helping leaders toachieve real Lean.The purpose is operationalized into the following research questions: - What understandingsof RFP can enable Lean implementations? - What understandings of ethics, leadership andculture can enable Lean implementations? - How can these understandings form a normativeframework for Lean leaders?The study is a qualitative, exploratory and descriptive case study with anabductive approach. The data have been collected by documents, interviews, questionnaires,and participant observations. Content and discourse analysis are used together with pattern-matchingto analyse the data.The study shows that it is important to understand the differences in culture (national/organizational) prior to Lean implementation and to conduct an organizational analysis to findsimilarities and differences between Lean and organizational values. The study also finds thatRFP is composed of elements in different cultural levels. The elements identified are ethics,leadership and culture, each of which has invisible elements, often linked to Japanese religionsand traditions, that need to be visualized and discussed. Previous research has presented variousframeworks and models exist but these are more know-what than know-how. Organizationsneed more know-how to create real Lean where RFP can be seen as the ‘how’.I developed a leadership model called Developmental Lean leadership (DLL) that aims tofind leadership that supports both employee and organizational development and can meet theneeds of a Lean leader, which are to act as a role model and support the development towardsa real Lean culture.I also developed a normative framework for Lean leaders called the RFP house, which it ishoped will help Lean leaders achieve real Lean in their organizations during implementations.