Lean leaders inspiring employee engagement in a healthcare setting

Leaders are assumed to play a key role in sustainability of lean work practices. This study focuses on the leaders' impact on employee engagement during the implementation of lean practices. The first part of this exploratory longitudinal study within a Dutch primary healthcare facility is reported. The employees of one team completed a survey and noted, during eight weeks, their sources of engagement in a diary. Additional site visits and interviews were held. Preliminary findings indicate that leaders may strengthen engagement by reducing non-medical workload via lean work practices. The resulting three propositions may guide future research in this field

How do leaders view their own Lean teams' behaviour?

Lean team members continuously improve work processes, thereby aiming to enhance customer and organisational value. Our exploratory study focuses on the real-life dynamics of five highly effective Lean teams in the workplace. Although the videorecorded team dynamics have not been thoroughly analysed yet, the preceding, selection-type interviews with key informants of those highly effective Lean teams are reported here and partly confirm the extant Lean theory. Analyses of the (video) data as well as the collected survey data will aim to specify common team values, behaviours and practices

Effective lean-team interactions through leader values and members’ information sharing behaviour

Leaders are often blamed when lean work-floor initiatives fail. We hypothesise that leanteam leaders’ work values affect their team members’ information sharing behaviour and, through them, attain more effective team interactions. 429 survey responses of leaders and members of 25 lean-teams in service and manufacturing organisations were analysed through structural equation modeling, linear regression analyses, and Sobel tests. The positive relationship between lean-team effectiveness and leaders’ self-transcendence values, and the negative relationship between lean-team effectiveness and leaders’ conservation values were partly mediated by team information sharing behaviour. Future research must compare the content of effective lean-team interactions to non-lean teams

Middle Managerial Behavior for Employee Strategic Alignment:A systematic review

While there exists a vast amount of research on strategy formulation, we know relatively little about how a formulated strategy is translated into results via strategic alignment. Middle managers are often noted as crucial actors in aligning employees to strategic organizational goals, yet their effective behaviors towards this end remain understudied. In response to various calls, this work reviews the available literature on the behaviors of middle managers in the context of strategic alignment of work-floor employees. We adopted a systematic literature review technique, starting with a thorough search with predefined search terms through ABI/Inform Complete and Scopus. The resulting thirteen empirical articles were content-analyzed by two independent raters, leading to a total of 169 behavioral items. Four meta-categories of middle-managerial behaviors were identified that support employee strategic alignment: (1) Direction-oriented behaviors (e.g., monitoring and checking performance); (2) Participation-oriented behaviors (e.g., offering help); (3) Encouragement-oriented behaviors (e.g., getting and giving feedback); and (4) Approachability-oriented behaviors (e.g., showing vulnerability). We present an integrative model of effective middle manager behaviors for employee strategic alignment, which includes, as extra yield, supportive middle managerial personality traits, knowledge and performance areas. Our specific and inclusive model fuels the needed future behavioral and quantitative studies, which can build upon a number of qualitative works that have been published to date, as our review has shown. Understanding exactly which middle managerial behaviors contribute to translating strategy into practice also helps coaches and HR officers in developing managers. This knowledge potentially improves the work lives of many employees

Multi-level Management and Leadership Skills in Lean Organizations

Research shows that senior management commitment is essential to a successful and sustainable transition to a Lean enterprise but less focus has been given to the role of middle managers. This paper represents two strands of connected research that explore the behaviors and competencies of desired leaders and managers across different levels of the lean organizations and identifies the skills required to support and sustain a Lean transition. The Cardiff University (UK) SUCCESS program discovered that there are subtle differences intop management and leadership skills required to facilitate successful change from those required to sustain the change. Whilst research at University of Twente (NL) concluded that middle managers in established Lean organizations display higher levels of aptitude in certain skills from those in earlier stages of the transformation process. Hence, we suggest that both top and middle management need to adopt double-loop learning in order to improve their management and leadership skills over time to sustain Lean

Stimulating ethical behavior through innovative ethics officers:An empirical study

Ethical misconduct and violations have been shown to seriously harm individuals and organizations and lead to massive fines or dismissals of employees and CEOs. Many firms have implemented formal ethics programs in order to prevent unethical behavior, yet such programs are often ineffective and take a traditional approach. This study investigated the role of personal characteristics and innovative work behavior of ethics officers, who are responsible for developing and improving ethics programs. An online survey was conducted among 114 Dutch ethics officers in large organizations. The data was analysed via Structural Equations Modeling and regression analysis. We found that ethics programs are perceived as more effective and may result in more normative ethical behavior when ethics officers engage in innovative work behavior. This is, in turn, influenced by ethics officers’ personal characteristics, namely conscientiousness and openness to experience. The personal characteristics of ethics officers are therefore essential input for implementing innovative work behavior. Contrary to existing views, we suggest that ethics officers should be seen as leading actors in corporate change towards more ethical behavior and therefore need to develop their personal characteristics. Future research is recommended for examining the work and personal characteristics of ethics officers in order to develop more ethical behavior in the workplace