دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی پیاده سازی تولید ناب: سبک های رهبری و متغیرهای زمینه ای - امرالد 2018

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how the association between leadership styles (task or relation orientation) and lean manufacturing (LM) implementation changes due to two contextual variables, team size and the leader’s age. Design/methodology/approach – The authors carried out a survey with 225 leaders from different Brazilian companies that are implementing LM. Research constructs were validated through rigorous procedures using confirmatory factor analysis. Hypotheses were tested using ordinary linear least squares regression. Findings – The results suggest that larger teams and more senior managers were negatively associated with LM implementation. Task-orientation style makes leaders more likely to achieve higher levels of LM than relation-orientation style leaders. Finally, the influence of relation-oriented leaders on LM implementation is contingent upon the size of the team. Research limitations/implications – Regarding study’s limitations, sample size and respondents’ location restrict results to this contextual condition, indicating that increasing the sample would help provide wider and more generalizable results. It is also worth noting that results are based on respondents’ (leaders) perspective. Hence, future studies may collect data from multiple perspectives, such as leaders and their followers, in order to compare results so as to verify the convergence or divergence among different respondents. Practical implications – The results suggest that leaders should have different behaviors according to the context in which they are inserted. Therefore, such behavioral prescriptions are useful for managers since they are pressured to achieve high operational performance in short time periods and with few resources. Further, companies undergoing lean implementation may also be able to stimulate proper leadership behaviors and promote development programs accordingly, which is extremely relevant since behavioral changes usually take time. Originality/value – The evolutionary process for achieving a successful lean enterprise requires different leadership styles according to the context in which leaders are inserted. This research provides arguments to help better understand the recommended leadership behaviors for lean implementation, complementing existing roadmaps by considering the proper leadership style as a contingency issue during lean implementation. Moreover, identifying the effect of contextual variables helps specify the contexts in which lean practices are more likely to be implemented.

6. Conclusions

The current research was conducted assessing leaders of Brazilian manufacturing companies, but our findings may apply to a wider population. Our results showed that a relation-oriented leadership style can be negative for the implementation of LM practices, and this is even worsened when leaders have larger teams, which was specifically observed for TQM. On the other hand, we identified that older leaders may struggle with LM implementation, and its impact is direct. Regarding task-oriented leaders, we verified that its effect is positive for most practices, but no moderation effect was found for this style orientation. Implications of these results are of considerable importance and relevance for both researchers and lean practitioners.

6.1 Implications for theory

From a theoretical perspective, our results provide additional evidence supporting the significance of understanding the contextual factors involved in the relationship between LM practices implementation and leadership styles (Gelei et al., 2015). However, this relationship, and the contextual variables that surround it, have only been theorized (e.g. Mann, 2009; Liker and Convis, 2011; Dombrowski and Mielke, 2014, van Dun et al., 2017), and not tested before. This research is a starting point to fill that gap in the literature, as we focus only on the relationships between LM practices and leadership styles orientation, considering the effect of the context. Nevertheless, our results show that there are associations between leadership context and styles orientation in LM practices implementation.