Lean systems effectiveness and transferability across multinational corporations: the role of culture

Lean management is a managerial approach widely recognized as powerful in reducing waste and continuously improving production processes of a factory. Many manufacturing organizations worldwide have implemented it obtaining significant enhancement in operational performance. Besides adopting it locally within a single factory, in recent decades a growing number of multinational corporations (MNCs) have sought to implement lean across their foreign factories. However, several lean projects at both single- and multi-factory level encountered problems, and some even failed to achieve such benefits. Culture is widely considered to be a critical success factor for lean implementation. There is yet a strong debate whether societal culture or organizational culture is most important in determining the success of lean implementation projects. Therefore, this thesis aims to enhance the understanding of the role of culture – both at societal and organizational level – in lean implementation by examining two related topics: 1. The distinctive characteristics of a successful lean manufacturing unit; 2. The transferability of successful lean systems across dispersed manufacturing factories within MNCs. To that purpose, two main research projects have been conducted. The High Performance Manufacturing project, involving 317 manufacturing units in 3 sectors and 10 countries, was used to explore the first topic according to survey methodology. For what concerns the second topic, I studied 7 successful lean transfer projects by mean of a multiple case study and an in-depth case study. The projects involved European sources and Chinese and U.S. recipients belonging to 4 different multinational corporations; in-depth case study focused on one of such project, launched by an Italian MNC towards its subsidiary in China. The findings of my research indicate that successful and unsuccessful lean factories differ for some organizational culture dimensions and for the extent of adoption of soft lean practices (i.e., lean practices concerning people and relations). Therefore, these characteristics are likely to make the difference in the successful implementation of lean. With regard to transferability of successful lean systems, results from in-depth case study stress the influence of cultural differences – in terms of extent of difference between source and recipient as well as peculiarities of the latter – on the success of the lean transfer project, and the importance of adopting a transfer approach that take into account such differences. Moreover, results from the multiple case study suggest that major problems in transferring a lean system are context specific – i.e., similar within a context and different between China and U.S. In order to succeed in transferring lean, source should adapt their projects; as shown by the cross-case analysis, the level of adaptation can be affected by the socio-cultural characteristics of a recipient unit and the organizational culture of the source. Collectively, these results contribute to the literature by providing a better understanding of the role of culture in lean implementation not only within local factories, but also in manufacturing subsidiaries overseas. Results can be particularly useful also for practitioners that are facing the challenging of implementing lean at international level.