Interest in complementarity and in its role in the design of organizations has garnered increasing attention in the academic literature (Ennen and Richter, 2010). Practices that work together are considered to be complementary when doing more of one practice increases the marginal return of another practice and vice versa (Milgrom and Roberts, 1995). Lean manufacturing is an ideal setting in which to study complementarity (Furlan et al., 2011) as it is recognized as an enterprise-wide management system consisting of interdependent practices (Roberts, 2004; Shah and Ward, 2007). Lean manufacturing was conceptualized by Krafcik et al. (1988), when studying Toyota as part of the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program, and it is generally accepted that lean manufacturing improves firm performance (e.g. Fullerton and Wempe, 2009; Hoferet al., 2012; Jayaram et al., 2010; Maiga and Jacobs, 2008). However, both Shah and Ward (2003) and Furlan et al. (2010) suggested that it is the simultaneous, systematic implementation of several practices that contributes to firm performance through the complementary effects of these practices. This implies that the partial implementation of practices or of practices that do not work in concert will contribute to a lesser extent to firm performance. The implementation of lean manufacturing has been found to be associated with companies’ management control mechanisms[1] (e.g. Åhlström and Karlsson, 1996; Fullerton et al., 2013; Kristensen and Israelsen, 2014; Netland et al., 2015), and it is recognized that management control mechanisms can either hinder or help lean manufacturing implementations (Åhlström and Karlsson, 1996; Fullerton et al., 2014). However, there is still much to understand about how management control mechanisms work in the lean manufacturing context. In this study, we investigate the complementary effects of management control mechanisms[2] on firm performance in lean manufacturing companies.