Presentation ELEC 2017

The Role of Middle Management

in Implementing Lean in

Financial Service Firms

ELEC 2017 8-9 November 2017

4th European Lean Educators Conference

Drs. Freek Hermkens CMC

Background

• Principal business consultant MLC

• >15 years experience as consultant

• financial service industry

• Manager and Trainer at MLC Academy

• Coach at Agile Coach Company

• PhD student at TuE

How and to what extent does middle management influence

continuous improvement of organizations in the financial service industry?

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Is Lean a Silver Bullet?

Change is never easy

for some organizations the transformation

comes more naturally, for others it requires

fundamental changes throughout the

organization and its people.

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Middle Manager

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Lot of discourse

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Middle management: an accelerator for CI or not?

Freek Hermkens (2015)

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Recent research

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Contextual conditions

Freek Hermkens (2017)

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Vignette Study: definition

• A vignette is: a short, carefully constructed description of

a person, object or situation, representing a systematic

combination of characteristics, to which research

participants respond thereby revealing their perceptions,

values, social norms or impressions of events.

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Source: Atzmüller and Stiener (2010)

Vignette Study: grounding CI by TM

As culture and values are to a large extent top management

driven, the role of top management in the implementation of

sustainable CI is critical here (Mann 2009; Snee 2010)

Central question

Whether or not there is a difference in adoption of CI by

middle management, based on the grounding of the CI

program in the organisation by top management

• Described 2 different ways of implementing continuous improvement

• Top management seeks to implement CI as an integral management philosophy

• Top management seeks to implement CI as a efficiency/ cost cutting program

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Vignette Study: execution

• April – October 2016

• Preparing the vignette including testing.

• Approaching a large bank in The Netherlands to participate.

• Defining the research population (474 managers).

• Setting up the vignette including the questions in Qualtrics.

• November 2016

• Inviting participants by mail to take part in the vignette study

• End December 2016

• End of possibility to participate

• Result: 107 managers participated

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Tested Hypotheses

1. When CI is mainly implemented as a management

philosophy rather than an efficiency program, it is more

likely that CI becomes part of the organizational culture.

2. When CI is mainly implemented as a management

philosophy rather than an efficiency program, it is more

likely that people in the company are focused on its

customers.

3. When CI is mainly implemented as a management

philosophy rather than an efficiency program, the work

atmosphere is likely to be better.

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Results

We found:

• Significant support in 6 questions for the hypotheses. • 3 questions in support of hypothesis 1

• 2 questions in support of hypothesis 2

• 1 question in support of hypothesis 3

• Conclusion • Consistent with our predictions, when CI is implemented as a

management philosophy rather than an efficiency program, it becomes

part of the organizational culture and the company becomes more

focused on its customers.

• We found only limited support for improvement of the work atmosphere

when implementing CI as a management philosophy.

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Questions

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For more information

Freek Hermkens

[email protected]

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