Sustaining competitive advantage through lean management systems: a multi-method analysis

Starting from the assumption that the adoption of lean management systems may support the creation of a sustainable competitive advantage, this research investigates the relationship between the level of implementation of lean systems, the adoption of “high involvement” management behaviors and the companies’ financial performances, controlling for such variables as the duration of the lean journey and the size of the firm. Through the application of traditional multivariate and qualitative analyses (OLS regressions and fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis – fs/QCA), this study validates the view of lean environments as complex and integrated sociotechnical systems, confirming that the configurational approach is the most appropriate to analyze lean systems. In this study are also identified some “high involvement” behaviors that differentiate the best performing companies from the average.