Filling the Ice House, 1934 oil on canvas by Harry Gottlieb (photo: cliff1066™, flickr)
The Toyota-based management approach Lean does not directly affect employees’ job satisfaction in either positive or negative direction, shows a research from DTU (Denmark’s Technical University) on the correlation between mental working environment and Lean. According to Associate Professor, Niels Møller from DTU Management, which is behind the research project, it may turn out that Lean can eventually make job satisfaction increase on the long run because the implementation of organizational changes itself, which usually causes transformation stress among employees, has not taken out on the job satisfaction .
In the workplaces where Lean specificly leads to a worse working environment, this is due the management misunderstanding the tool and only using it to “get employees to work faster,” so Jan Lorentzen, who is a specialist in mental work environment at DI.
“We think, that a long term work with Lean give a higher degree of increased job satisfaction and productivity”, says Niels Møller.
Source: Jyllands-Posten 24 January
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