DECOUPLING AND ESSENTIAL EFFECTS OF LEAN MANAGEMENT ON JOB SATISFACTION, HEALTH AND DEPRESSION. A MIXED METHODS APPROACH

Abstract

The literature has analyzed the effects of
lean management on job satisfaction and health in
terms of decoupling or essential effects. However,
these studies give a partial understanding of the
phenomenon considering these two effects separately,
and do not yet explain how and which lean characteristics influence employees’ job satisfaction or health.
The purpose of this article is to study these two
competing claims. We used a mixed methods strategy
to contribute to this stream of research combining
both qualitative (a case study) and quantitative (statistical analysis based on the 2016-2017 national French
SUMER survey on 26,494 employees) studies. We
showed that employees’ job satisfaction and health
result from both lean decoupling and essential effects.
We contributed to lean literature in clarifying the
theoretical definition of lean management considered
as a bundle, which involved identifying a distinctive
coherent combination of lean characteristics in terms
organizational principles, work organization and
management tools built around rationalization logic.
The first empirical contribution was to shed light on
the way lean decoupling could be associated with
employees’ job dissatisfaction and health problems.
Our second contribution was to identify a negative
essential effect of a lean bundle on work health
and general health through work intensification.
Moreover, we found that the core lean just-in-time
principle and both core work organization characteristics – work standardization and quality management
– are associated with health and depression problems.