Title: The influence of cultural dimensions on lean projects success and barriers

Authors: Sara Antomarioni; Filippo Emanuele Ciarapica; Ilaria De Sanctis; Joaquin Ordieres-Meré

Addresses: Università Politecnica delle Marche, Via Brecce Bianche, 12 – 60131, Ancona, Italy ' Università Politecnica delle Marche, Via Brecce Bianche, 12 – 60131, Ancona, Italy ' Università Politecnica delle Marche, Via Brecce Bianche, 12 – 60131, Ancona, Italy ' Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Calle Ramiro de Maeztu, 7, 28040, Madrid, Spain

Abstract: Implementing lean projects harbours relevant difficulties, hence, it is interesting to evaluate whether companies that operate in different cultural context experience the same kind of barriers. Few studies analysed the influence of cultural dimensions on lean projects failure. In this context, this work aims at addressing the existing research gap, trying to answer the following research questions: 1) Do the cultural dimensions influence the perception lean projects' success and lean practices implementation level?; 2) Does the type and level of barriers to lean practices implementation depend on the cultural dimensions? Therefore, the experiences of 171 worldwide companies were collected through a questionnaire and clustered by the cultural dimensions, through a k-means procedure. Two clusters were defined and were compared through Mann-Whitney test, proving a statistically significant difference for lean practices implementation and the majority of lean barriers, both during the start-up and the sustaining phases.

Keywords: lean projects; lean success; lean barriers; lean implementation; national cultural dimensions; cluster analysis; k-means; Mann-Whitney test.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMDM.2019.098644

International Journal of Management and Decision Making, 2019 Vol.18 No.2, pp.151 - 182

Received: 10 Nov 2017
Accepted: 20 Feb 2018
Published online: 29 Mar 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article