Lean and organizational resilience: A discussion

Lean is widely regarded as a strategic management approach to increase competitiveness by systematically eliminating waste through the active involvement of employees. Nevertheless, during low-probability, high-impact disruptive events, many organizations utilizing Lean face severe negative implications, which raise doubts about Lean's effectiveness. This article aims to discuss how Lean impacts organizational resilience based on the concepts proposed by Biringer et al. (2013), who defined resilience capability through three categories: absorptive capability, adaptive capability, and restorative capability. Extensive debates among the authors and a narrative literature review were conducted, allowing for a deeper discussion and the formulation of research propositions. By discriminating the effects of Lean adoption across different capabilities, we can disentangle the Lean-resilience relationship. Overall, we argue that organizations with higher levels of Lean implementation may be able to adapt and restore more easily from severe disruptive events than organizations with lower implementation levels. In turn, organizations with lower levels of Lean implementation might present greater organizational slack that favors the absorption of the implications caused by such disruptions, which is less expected in high-Lean organizations. Our study disentangles the inherent paradox or tension in the relationship between Lean and resilience, showing that a time dimension is introduced by the different capabilities that explain the differing impacts of Lean. This leads to opportunities for further investigation of Lean and organizational resilience.