پیاده سازی تولید ناب: سبک های رهبری و متغیرهای زمینه ای Lean manufacturing implementation: leadership styles and contextual variables

1. Introduction In the transition from a traditional mass-production organization to a lean manufacturing (LM) enterprise, transformation in both technical and socio-cultural aspects is needed (Tortorella and Fogliatto, 2014). Since a successful LM implementation is highly dependent on firm employees (Sawhney and Chason, 2005), it is important to comprehend the underlying culture of LM practices (Bhasin and Burcher, 2006). In this context, leaders play a crucial role in the establishment of such lean culture (Mann, 2009; Shook, 2010). Leadership commitment and leader’s communication skills have been highlighted as key managerial attributes for successful LM implementation (Womack and Jones, 2003; Spear, 2004). In this sense, common characteristics of a lean leader are collaboration, delegation, and the ability to motivate employees (Angelis et al., 2011; Pamfilie et al., 2012; Dombrowski and Mielke, 2014; Gelei et al., 2015). Overall, Emiliani and Stec (2005) and Suresh et al. (2012) suggested that lean enterprises need to have transformational leaders at the top, who behave according to expected culture and disseminate the proper lean principles. Although leadership is a highly popular topic in academia, there are still gaps in the literature that must be addressed, in particular in companies that are implementing LM (Marodin and Saurin, 2013; Bortolotti, Boscari and Danese, 2015). Researchers also emphasize the influence of contextual variables on leadership performance, which may hinder or favor their leadership in the shift to a leaner company (Deschamps, 2005; Bäckström and Ingelsson, 2015). For instance, Castka et al. (2001) and Marksberry et al. (2010) indicated that size of the team, evidenced by the number of followers, might be an important contextual variable for determining assertive leadership styles. Parry et al. (2010) and Tortorella et al. (2017) indicated that greater leadership experience, which is closely related with leaders’ age, may entail enhanced interpersonal skills that might favor the leader’s choice for behaviors that more effectively support LM implementation. Thus, we argue that the identification of the contextual variables and leadership styles in an LM implementation could improve the understanding of the difficulties that companies have to implement LM. Therefore, we propose the following two research questions: RQ1. How do different leadership styles favor LM implementation? RQ2. How does context influence the relationship between leadership style and LM implementation? Thus, this paper aims at identifying the relationship between leadership styles and the implementation of LM practices, as well as to analyze the moderating effect of the inherent contextual variables of leadership. We carried out a survey with 225 leaders from different Brazilian companies that are undergoing LM implementation. Respondents were asked to fill three questionnaires in the survey: the implementation level of LM practices, their leadership style and adaptability, which is defined through the application of the situational leadership (SL) questionnaire proposed by Blanchard (2010), and details about contextual variables pointed out in the literature as influential for leadership style adoption.