Exploring the impact of higher management's leadership styles on Lean management

Lean is often considered as a collection of tools and practices that can be used to achieve superior operational and financial performance. However, there is consensus nowadays that the use of Lean tools and practices is a minimum, but not sufficient condition for successful Lean implementations for which a culture of continuous improvement (CI) and Lean leadership are also necessary. Though a positive connection is made in literature between Lean leadership and the transformational, servant and empowering leadership styles, empirical evidence is scarce. In this paper, we explore the relationships between these upper management leadership styles and Lean. Survey data of 199 responses from Dutch organisations shows that Lean sponsorship and improvement stimulation by higher management is indeed positively related to Lean, though improvement stimulation is particularly related to a culture of CI. Servant leadership is negatively related to the use of Lean tools and empowered leadership is positively related to the use of Lean tools. No relationships are found between the contemporary leadership styles and Lean practices.