Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to better understand the role that leadership plays in the success of Lean management (LM) implementation, by trying to identify what is the impact of the transactional, transformational, directive and empowering leadership styles on the success of such an implementation in Portuguese companies, and what are the most important leaders’ attributes. Design/methodology/approach – An on-line questionnaire was distributed to 65 manufacturing and services Portuguese organizations that have implemented LM. Findings – The results suggest that the empowering leadership style has a positive impact on the success of LM implementation. Even though results do not allow concluding about the impact of the other styles, several leader’s attributes were identified as having influence: individualized consideration, information sharing, skill development, intellectual stimulation, assigned goals and self-directed decision making. Originality/value – Very few studies have addressed the role of leadership in the success of adopting LM and, to the best knowledge, only one paper studied the critical attributes of leaders in LM implementation. Moreover, the present study focuses in Portugal, country where this topic has rarely been investigated.

Introduction

The successful implementation of LM in some well-known organizations boosted its implementation in many others around the world. In addition, the last economic recession increased the need for competition and therefore the need to implement tools and techniques that improve the competitive level (Alsmadi et al., 2012), with LM practices among those. However, several cases in which the LM implementation has been reported unsuccessful (Sorooshian et al., 2017), justify the increasing concern about implementation aspects (Van Landeghem, 2014). Some studies have identified the critical success factors for the successful Lean implementation, specifying leadership as one of them (Achanga et al., 2006). In effect, leaders’ role in an organization is nowadays recognized as critical to support change (Pamfilie et al., 2012). Surprisingly, only a few studies address the role of this specific factor in LM deployment (Gelei et al., 2015, studied the attributes, not the leadership styles and Tortorella et al., 2018, analyzed specific contextual factors such as the age of the leader). The purpose of our research is to fulfill this gap in the literature. Following this research direction, this study tries to identify what is the impact of leadership style on the success of LM implementation (this is not performed by Gelei et al., 2015 neither by Tortorella et al., 2018), seeking to identify the leadership style that is more conductive to a successful LM implementation, and what are the most important attributes that leaders should have to facilitate this implementation. Our results are expected to help organizations that are already implementing LM or planning to implement it to check whether their leadership has the right attributes to facilitate success. This research was based on a questionnaire distributed to 65 Portuguese companies that have implemented Lean. The data collected from the questionnaire were subsequently statistically analyzed, enabling us the determination of the styles and attributes of leadership associated with success in the procedure of implementing LM. The paper is structured as follows. The subsequent section provides the literature review conducted prior to the research work. The third section provides the information about the research hypotheses. The fourth section presents the results and, the final section provides the concluding remarks of the research work carried out.