Effective lean-team interactions through leader values and members’ information sharing behaviour

Leaders are often blamed when lean work-floor initiatives fail. We hypothesise that leanteam leaders’ work values affect their team members’ information sharing behaviour and, through them, attain more effective team interactions. 429 survey responses of leaders and members of 25 lean-teams in service and manufacturing organisations were analysed through structural equation modeling, linear regression analyses, and Sobel tests. The positive relationship between lean-team effectiveness and leaders’ self-transcendence values, and the negative relationship between lean-team effectiveness and leaders’ conservation values were partly mediated by team information sharing behaviour. Future research must compare the content of effective lean-team interactions to non-lean teams.