| This research was designed to answer the question "To what extent are the inherent strengths of an individual employee correlated with that employee's degree of affective, continuance, and/or normative commitment to his organization's change to lean production?" This quantitative, correlational, multisite study employed a survey methodology. Two previously validated survey tools were used: Herscovitch and Meyer's survey on employee commitment to organizational change used in their 2002 Journal of Applied Psychology article entitled Commitment to Organizational Change: Extension of a Three-Component Model, and the commercially available StrengthsFinder 2.0 (Rath, 2007) survey. The study's independent variables are the top five strengths of each participant as identified by the StrengthsFinder 2.0 survey. The commitment profile, along with its three components of affective, continuance, and normative commitment reported by each survey participant on the Herscovitch and Meyer survey constitute the dependent variables.;A gap existed in the literature. While the literature on lean production and on employee organizational commitment is extensive, little research had been conducted on how individual employees' strengths relate to those individuals' commitment to organizational change such as the change associated with implementation of lean production in a manufacturing environment. Developing a deeper understanding of the relationship between individual employees' strengths and the degree to which those employees are likely to evidence commitment to the extensive organizational changes associated with implementation of lean production may be of significant practical value. Many organizations attempting to implement lean production struggle to do so. The ability to identify, a priori, those employees most likely to evidence strong commitment to implementing lean production may improve an organization's ability to successfully complete that change. |
