A Multi-group Analysis of the Impact of Lean Manufacturing Practices on Operational Performance: Does the National Culture Matter?

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-150-0_3How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Lean manufacturing; National culture; Practice-culture congruence; Hofstede’s cultural dimensions; Operational performance; Multi-group invariance analysis

Abstract

Although there are abundant studies addressing the technical aspects of lean manufacturing, few have been done to examine the influence of national culture on its effectiveness. Moreover, the “true” relationship between national culture and operational performance from practising lean manufacturing is probably non-linear, thus leading to an inconsistent role of national culture in previous research. By employing multi-group invariance analyses that do not face the strict assumption of linearity relationships, this study aims to investigate how the impact of lean manufacturing practices on operational performance differs across groups with different national cultural dimensions. Seven models associated with five cultural dimensions and two control variables (i.e. type of ownership, size of enterprise) were developed and tested based on 271 global manufacturing plants located in Vietnam. The results indicated that lean manufacturing is more effective in plants with a small size that value a low power distance, low uncertainty avoidance, and feminine culture. These results partially support the practice-culture congruence perspective. In terms of theoretical implications, this study provides an alternative analytical approach for studying the role of natural culture and shows what specific cultural dimensions are congruent with lean manufacturing practices. These empirical results contribute to a deeper understanding of the reasons why certain companies find lean manufacturing practices difficult and/or fail to achieve their target performance.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Le Nguyen Hoang
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/05/23
TI  - A Multi-group Analysis of the Impact of Lean Manufacturing Practices on Operational Performance: Does the National Culture Matter?
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Challenges: Strategic Adaptation in The World of Uncertainties (ICECH 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 20
EP  - 39
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-150-0_3
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-150-0_3
ID  - Hoang2023
ER  -