The Role of Culture in Implementing Lean Production System

Culture is a powerful, latent, and often unconscious set of forces that determine both of our individual and collective behavior, ways of perceiving, thought patterns, and values. Organizational culture in particular matters because cultural elements determine strategy, goals, and modes of operating. Many international managerial theories or production methods work well locally, but can not receive expected result once they are practiced cross nationally. Although SDWT can be seen as an example of cultural adaptation of lean manufacturing system, yet little is known about the inefficiency caused by the cultural differences. The academic community has remained primarily dedicated to single culture and comparative research which is no more sufficient. Cultures are patterns of interacting elements. To decipher that pattern, we propose an analytical framework based upon the investigation on how Taiwanese enterprises cope with the cultural resistance to achieve expected goals.