Lean Management Impact on Quality of Working Life: Study on Center Portugal Region’s Companies

Abstract

The main goal for this study is to measure the impact that Lean Management has on the human resources of the companies, namely, on the critical and important points for them. There will be identified the most valued factors for the workforce of a company, and developed research, through survey application, which seeks to get a score for each dimension of the two groups, Lean and Non-Lean. This work will concern organizations based on Por
tugal’s Center Region, identifying on the literature which activity sectors apply Lean the most and the ones who don’t, to stablish a connection between the companies, Lean adoption and Quality of Working Life. Five variables, to be as
sessed through survey by questionnaire, are formulated, which quantify the most influential dimensions on Quality of
Working Life, namely, working conditions, professional relationships, work-social life link, recognition and professional
growth and work organization. The results obtained show that there are significant statistic differences between the
two groups of companies, Lean and Non-Lean, on the first four dimensions and non-significant on the last. The main conclusion of this work is that Lean adoption may have potential influence on Quality of Working Life. The results ob
tained show that companies with these practices have better labor satisfaction.