پیاده سازی برنامه های کم سود شرکت: اثر شیوه های کنترل مدیریت Implementing Corporate Lean Programs: The Effect of Management Control Practices

Corporate lean programs aim to implement lean manufacturing practices in the firms’ global plant networks. Despite the documented benefits of these practices (Shah and Ward, 2003; Womack and Jones, 1996; Womack et al., 1990), many global manufacturers often struggle to implement such programs in their production networks (Netland and Aspelund, 2014; Pay, 2008; Schonberger, 2008). As with the implementation of any company-wide improvement program, the management control practices used can foster or impede the lean implementation process (Ahlström and Karlsson, 1996; Anand et al., 2009; Bititci et al., 2011; Fullerton et al., 2013; Kennedy and Widener, 2008; Liker, 2004). This paper investigates the relation between the use of several common management control practices and the implementation of a corporate lean program. We organize our analysis using the conceptual framework of management control articulated most recently by Merchant and Stede (2012). The framework views management control as elements that seek to control and coordinate the inputs to a process, the process itself, and the outputs of a process. This input-process-output control framework guides our empirical analysis, which uses factorylevel data collected from a world-leading commercial vehicles manufacturer regarding its on-going effort to implement lean on a global scale. Specifically, we use internal company data from formal audits of lean implementation in 36 plants of the manufacturer as well as data from a questionnaire survey collected from multiple respondents in the same plants. The audit data were compiled by an internal team of experts from the manufacturer who had conducted on-site assessments of the extent of lean implementation at each factory. We combine the audit data with our survey data, which include information regarding the use of management control practices in each factory, as well as changes in the operational performance of the factory. We supplement the quantitative data with factory visits and 2 semi-structured interviews with factory employees to improve our understanding of the manufacturer’s lean program and management control practices. We use two-stage least-squares methods to analyze the data. The first-stage regression tests the extent to which management control practices relate to the extent of lean implementation. The secondstage regression examines the relation between the extent of lean implementation in a factory and changes in its operational performance. To operationalize our conceptual framework of management control, we identify the extent to which factory managers create dedicated lean implementation teams that support the lean program (i.e., input control), develop lean-focused performance reporting and initiate top-down lean implementation audits (i.e., process control), and use financial rewards and nonfinancial rewards to incentivize lean implementation in the factory (i.e., output control). This paper contributes to the literature on the role of management control practices in implementing large-scale strategic initiatives such as corporate lean programs (e.g., Bititci et al., 2011; Fullerton et al., 2013; Kennedy and Widener, 2008). We show that use of dedicated lean implementation teams, lean-focused (bottom-up) performance reports, and nonfinancial rewards relate positively to extensive implementation of corporate lean programs in factories. We do not find a similar relation between lean implementation and deployment of financial rewards (tied to predetermined implementation targets) or use of internal audits initiated by factory management (top-down) to evaluate adherence to the lean program. Overall, these findings suggest that when implementing a corporate lean program, the firm must pay careful attention to the type of management control practices it uses for controlling the input, process, and output of the lean program. Our research also confirms the positive relation between implementation of lean manufacturing and performance in a plant (e.g., Browning and Heath, 2009; Cua et al., 2001; Fullerton and Wempe, 2009; Furlan et al., 2011; Jayaram et al., 2010; Mackelprang and Nair, 2010; Nair, 2006; Shah and Ward, 2003). 3 Section 2 reviews the literature and develops our hypotheses. Section 3 provides details on our research setting and methodology. Section 4 reports our empirical evidence, which is discussed in more detail in Section 5. Section 6 presents concluding remarks.