Mastering the curation of organizational innovation: Exploring lean six sigma implementation from three organizational climate perspectives

Citation

(2021), "Mastering the curation of organizational innovation: Exploring lean six sigma implementation from three organizational climate perspectives", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 26-28. https://doi.org/10.1108/HRMID-12-2020-0272

The appetite of organizations to discover new models for carving out innovation-fueled competitive advantages is ever-present in board meetings across the globe. A research paper by Mohamed Alblooshi and Shamsuzzaman (2020) explores the link between Lean Six Sigma's (LSS) intangible impacts and organizational climate factors. A conceptual model is generated with the aim of facilitating organizational innovation through the application of LSS. Data for the study were gathered from a literature review of 24 LSS impact-related articles and from interviews with experts on LSS in organizations.

Unpacking lean six sigma

Six Sigma arose in the 1980s at telecommunications company Motorola to embed a sense of individual responsibility for elements like product quality and performance within every employee. The complimentary concept of Lean was developed at Toyota to streamline their manufacturing. LSS is a conflation of Six Sigma (SS) and Lean that delivers tool maximization efficiency and productivity enhancements in organizational processes, centered upon both minimizing waste through the Lean element while also reducing costs and error through the SS element. LSS therefore integrates capabilities like leadership and culture evolution into its optimization-seeking repertoire. Hence LSS brings together both soft and hard systems into a core approach of incremental innovation promotion, including the deployment of external resource-focused open innovation practice.

A particular key ingredient of organizational innovation is leadership that empowers employees, which combines valuably with the capacity of LSS to stimulate creative thought. In addition, committing to a high absorptive capacity through organizational learning means innovation efforts and impacts can be boosted consistently.

Understanding organizational LSS impacts

The LSS experts who participated in the study were asked 14 open-ended questions, for example various experience-based questions. These revealed that the scope of LSS's impacts spans marketing and finance impacts, like cost reduction and elevating product quality and reliability. Yet it was also found that LSS has intangible soft impacts, both on an organizational and an individual level. The study's results, which the authors used to form their conceptual model, revealed LSS's organizational-level impacts to be that:

• The impact of LSS's impact on structure and hierarchy did relate positively to openness and trust. LSS removed barriers and reduced the number of levels within departments, thereby reducing communication complexity.

• LSS evolves company cultures so that they embrace continuous improvement. Hence LSS's organizational culture impact linked positively with engaging with challenges and with building internal idea-backing.

• In the context of change adaptability impacts, LSS was used to improve process maps. LSS's impact on organizational change adaptability positively relates to organizational innovation climate factors like freedom and autonomy, and risk taking.

• LSS was used to create a largely innovation-led organizational culture. This positively relates to time and space for ideas being granted and supported.

• LSS elevated the organization's image and reputation. This LSS impact's use of staff resources positively relates to time and space for ideas being created.

• Additional beneficial impacts include the finding that LSS was leveraged to boost both the effective provision for meeting customer needs, and to elevate competitiveness in the market. LSS makes an impact on employee behaviors like job satisfaction, engagement and morale, through a positive commitment to the expression of values such as trust and openness, involvement, and autonomy.

The above elements collectively drive the success of LSS by lowering employees' mental resistance to change, so that they can readily embrace new opportunities to innovate.

A trio of organizational climate types

Three types of organizational climate were identified. Firstly, an organization support climate, which relates to inter-employee collaborative relationships that boost the double-whammy combination of satisfaction and performance. Secondly, an organizational rule climate is concerned with rule-based ecosystem formation, and the extents to which these rules are enforced. Thirdly, an organizational innovation climate is composed of elements like high trust and emotional safety, openness, autonomy, support for ideas, debate, humor, conflicts, and risk taking. In particular, the organizational innovation climate is deemed to be the overarching organizational climate type, since all the others ultimately feed into it. Only the humor element of an organizational innovation climate was an exception to the otherwise consistent trend of LSS intangible impacts directly influencing the organizational innovation climate.

Individual LSS impact results

LSS's impacts at the individual behavioral level were revealed to be:

• Improved deployment of the workforce.

• Higher trust in managers.

• Elevated employee engagement and motivation levels.

• Greater job performance and job satisfaction.

Setting out LSS's value and mindset shifts

Crucially, the results highlight that an organizational culture that encourages risk, values flexibility, and operates on collaborative teamwork is a cornerstone for LSS success. The intangible impacts of LSS extended widely into this cultural realm, and into factors like the organization's change capacity, hierarchy relationships, and reputation. The organizations willing to embrace risk appear to be better placed to enjoy the full suite of advantages that LSS implementation offers.

Based on their findings that a positive relationship exists between LSS and innovation, the study's authors convey the following managerial guidance, that:

• They should implement LSS as a mechanism for achieving its full spectrum of benefits, given the direct link between LSS practices and positive innovation progress. The outcome should predictably be better quality products, controlled costs and, in turn, more satisfied customers.

• LSS's less-known, softer intangible elements are beneficial for fostering greater innovation capability and adoption within the organization's internal climate. This challenges critical views that LSS takes the edge off innovation efforts by standardizing innovation's inputs.

• Investing in both innovation and quality enhancement programs is worthwhile given their potential to return competitive marketplace survival value.

Commentary

The review is based on “Investigating the relationship between Lean Six Sigma's intangible impacts and organisational innovation climate factors” (2020). This research paper concentrates on revealing the significant positive connection between Lean Six Sigma (LSS) and innovation, due to fundamental truths such as that both aim offer out quality products into the marketplace in a cost efficient manner. This LSS-innovation connection is also impacted by the intangible phenomena of organizational culture and organizational learning, since without teams willingly taking risks, the drivers of LSS and innovation fall away. This activity creates an organizational innovation climate that's poised for incremental success.