Insights in Lean values: Exploring links to sustainable development

Sammanfattning: The Quality Management initiative Lean is a popular method used by organisations to engage in organisational development. The Lean philosophy is grounded in numerous values. The organisations must implement and apply these values to achieve the desired results. Lean poses a dilemma in that many organisations fail to implement it because they fail to change, and they fail to maintain their new organisational culture. Lean's values are linked to sustainable development principles, and organisations that have implemented Lean have achieved results consistent with a more sustainable society. Previous studies have shown that more research is needed in areas in which business leaders require more support and knowledge so that they can combine these areas to strive for sustainable development. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute a deeper understanding of the application of Lean values when implementing Lean, and the potential to interlink to sustainability theory. To achieve this purpose, studies have been conducted in three organisations. Data were collected through a survey, interviews, and a systematic literature review was conducted that was also used to analyse findings from the empirical data. The results have been presented in four different papers. The findings provide deeper knowledge of Lean values during Lean implementation. They also provide a picture of the complexity in the inter-linkages between the values embodied in Lean and sustainable development principles. This thesis shows that the length of time that Lean has been implemented affects the kind and extent to which values are visible in an organisation: more values are visible in organisations that have worked the longest following Lean implementation. It has also been found that the values articulated in an organisation’s vision and strategy for implementing Lean have a greater perceived presence among employees than other Lean values. As well, differences were found in the presence of Lean values between the operational level and the strategic level of an organisation. However, findings indicated that the Lean values that were visible were more often fragmented rather than a pure value as presented in the theory. The findings also showed that interlinkages between some of sustainability principles and Lean values are more visible in one of the two organisational levels. For example, ´Waste reduction´ was only visible at the operational level. Implementing and applying Lean takes time and requires a change in the organisational culture. This thesis concluded that the Lean values of the ‘System view’ and ‘Long-term thinking’ have low presence and are not a part of the values considered most important to employees when implementing Lean. For organisations at the beginning of their implementation, this knowledge may be good to consider as failures with implementation are often due to the fact that change in organisational culture does not happen as intended. This finding indicates that there are gaps in the knowledge among employees about the important links between Lean and sustainable development. It is difficult to draw boundaries between the values when they should be recognized as a system.