Walking around the pyramids: Managers’ shop-floor activities in Lean-inspired organizations

The approach in this article is to study leadership activities from the shop-floor workers’ perspectives during the implementation of a Lean-inspired production concept – an angle of approach that corresponds to a need for a deeper knowledge of the interactions between organizational structures and the physical work environment. The empirical findings are from a national R&D program called the Production Leap and collected through different methods: semi-structured interviews carried out at eight manufacturing companies, the open-ended part of a longitudinal survey, and participative observations. Lean leadership practices at these companies do not enable the possibilities of developing the technical systems or work relationships between the managers and the shop-floor workers. Instead, they provide the means and activities to circumvent coordination problems and create a feeling of participation. The results here indicate that leadership activities and coordination of work do not, as it is sometimes argued by the proponents of Lean, ‘turn the pyramid’ of power upside down. One reason for this is the lack of social structures in the organization.