Continuous improvement in teams: The (mis)fit between improvement and operational activities of improvement teams

Since the 1970s and 1980s, increasing attention has been paid to the Japanese ways of organising production. One of the subjects often discussed is the importance of continuous incremental improvements. Nowadays, for many organisations, continuous improvement has become an important topic; many organisations are considering clever ways to organise ongoing incremental improvements. In this thesis, one way of organising such improvements is examined: continuous improvement by improvement teams. An improvenemt team is a group of people tasked with solving problems in their own work, often with the help of a coach.In the thesis, the focus is on the problems that arise when improvement activities are performed by teams. It is investigated whether the correspondences and differences between the operational and the improvement activities carried out by the team members can explain the problems that arise. To examine this, improvement teams, operating in companies, were extensively studied over several years.This thesis contains an overview and discussion of the most significant literature on continuous improvement, the theoretical framework used to examine the research question, a discussion of the research method that was used, an analysis of the research data that was collected, and a discussion of the major findings.