Leader values, followers' information sharing, and team effectiveness: Advancing lean team cultures

When work teams fail to sustain lean management methods, people frequently blame the “organizational culture.” Empirical tests of lean cultural content are nevertheless scarce. This study examined a lean team effectiveness model, comprising of relevant parts of Schwartz’s work-value theory as well as Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, and Jundt’s (2005) IMOI model. Two work value clusters of lean team leaders and their followers’ information sharing behavior are hypothesized to explain lean team effectiveness. Based on valid survey scales, we surveyed team leaders and members (N = 429) and tested the hypotheses with the aggregated dataset; this comprised of 25 lean teams involved in commercial and public services and in manufacturing. We were able to remove considerable common source-bias. As expected, 1) lean team effectiveness was significantly linked to high scores on leader self-transcendence values and low scores on leader conservation values; 2) followers in effective lean teams were significantly more
engaged in information sharing than those in the less effective teams; and 3) a partial mediation
effect of follower information sharing (and thus followers’ “power of words”) was established
between leaders’ self-transcendence values and lean team effectiveness. Practical
recommendations pertaining to value-based selection of lean team leaders, and their presumed
role-modeling of information sharing are given; their teams clearly thrive if their members are
enabled to share information. In order to further uncover the precise content of (effective) lean
team cultures, and how that may differ from similar non-lean teams, more comparative lean team
effectiveness research is proposed.