presentation elec 2017
TRANSCRIPT
The Role of Middle Management
in Implementing Lean in
Financial Service Firms
ELEC 2017 8-9 November 2017
4th European Lean Educators Conference
Drs. Freek Hermkens CMC
Background
• Principal business consultant MLC
• >15 years experience as consultant
• financial service industry
• Manager and Trainer at MLC Academy
• Coach at Agile Coach Company
• PhD student at TuE
How and to what extent does middle management influence
continuous improvement of organizations in the financial service industry?
1
Is Lean a Silver Bullet?
Change is never easy
for some organizations the transformation
comes more naturally, for others it requires
fundamental changes throughout the
organization and its people.
2
Middle Manager
3
Lot of discourse
4
Middle management: an accelerator for CI or not?
Freek Hermkens (2015)
5
Recent research
6
Contextual conditions
Freek Hermkens (2017)
7
Vignette Study: definition
• A vignette is: a short, carefully constructed description of
a person, object or situation, representing a systematic
combination of characteristics, to which research
participants respond thereby revealing their perceptions,
values, social norms or impressions of events.
8
Source: Atzmüller and Stiener (2010)
Vignette Study: grounding CI by TM
As culture and values are to a large extent top management
driven, the role of top management in the implementation of
sustainable CI is critical here (Mann 2009; Snee 2010)
Central question
Whether or not there is a difference in adoption of CI by
middle management, based on the grounding of the CI
program in the organisation by top management
• Described 2 different ways of implementing continuous improvement
• Top management seeks to implement CI as an integral management philosophy
• Top management seeks to implement CI as a efficiency/ cost cutting program
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Vignette Study: execution
• April – October 2016
• Preparing the vignette including testing.
• Approaching a large bank in The Netherlands to participate.
• Defining the research population (474 managers).
• Setting up the vignette including the questions in Qualtrics.
• November 2016
• Inviting participants by mail to take part in the vignette study
• End December 2016
• End of possibility to participate
• Result: 107 managers participated
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Tested Hypotheses
1. When CI is mainly implemented as a management
philosophy rather than an efficiency program, it is more
likely that CI becomes part of the organizational culture.
2. When CI is mainly implemented as a management
philosophy rather than an efficiency program, it is more
likely that people in the company are focused on its
customers.
3. When CI is mainly implemented as a management
philosophy rather than an efficiency program, the work
atmosphere is likely to be better.
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Results
We found:
• Significant support in 6 questions for the hypotheses. • 3 questions in support of hypothesis 1
• 2 questions in support of hypothesis 2
• 1 question in support of hypothesis 3
• Conclusion • Consistent with our predictions, when CI is implemented as a
management philosophy rather than an efficiency program, it becomes
part of the organizational culture and the company becomes more
focused on its customers.
• We found only limited support for improvement of the work atmosphere
when implementing CI as a management philosophy.
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Questions
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