Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a developed questionnaire which measure Appreciative Inquiry, Lean values and co-workers health. The purpose is also to explore if and how Appreciative Inquiry correlates with Lean values and co-workers’ perceived health in an organisation working with Lean.Methodology/Approach: To investigate the relationship between Lean, Appreciative Inquiry and perceived co-worker health, a questionnaire was developed based on two previously tested questionnaires. The new questionnaire was answered by 841 co-workers at a Swedish municipality and was then analysed to explore in what way Appreciative Inquiry correlates with a numberof Lean values as well as perceived co-worker health.Findings: All variables were found to be significantly correlated with the variable ‘Appreciative Inquiry’. The variable ‘Continuous improvements’ relates most to ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ followed by ‘Eliminating Waste’ as those variables can be considered to have a large positive relationship. ‘Supportive Leadership’ and ‘System view’ have a medium positive relation to ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ and the variables ‘Health’ and ‘Customt.er focus’ have a small relation to Appreciative Inquiry in this contex.
Highlights
Global competition is constantly increasing, and this, together with the low-wage economies of the developing world, poses a substantial challenge to managers in the manufacturing, service and public service sectors (Radnor and Barnes, 2007)
The presented and tested questionnaire can be used to measure to what extent the values Appreciative Inquiry, Lean values and co-workers health permeates organisations since the internal consistency for all variables can be considered acceptable
It can be used as a tool for measuring the start of a Lean initiative as well as monitoring progress
Summary
Global competition is constantly increasing, and this, together with the low-wage economies of the developing world, poses a substantial challenge to managers in the manufacturing, service and public service sectors (Radnor and Barnes, 2007) To meet this demand and to endorse changes and progress toward business excellence, management initiatives such as Quality Management (QM), Lean, Business Process Reengineering and Integral Health Management have been used, see for instance (Zwetsloot and Pot, 2004; Docherty, 2002). By using Appreciative Leadership, the creative potential among co-workers can be organised and shaped into positive power (Whitney and Trosten-Bloom, 2010) This is important as work-life balance has a major influence on business productivity and on the economy as a whole (Hughes, 2007). Research of the use of Appreciative Inquiry has increased drastically in recent years especially in public organisations (see for instance Carter, 2006), but research combining Lean and Appreciative Inquiry is rather rare (Hansen, 2015)
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