Desirée van Dun- PhD
- Professor (Associate) at Politecnico di Milano
Desirée van Dun
- PhD
- Professor (Associate) at Politecnico di Milano
About
37
Publications
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Introduction
I am an Associate Professor in the field of Organizational Behaviour, Operations Management, and Change Management. My Cum Laude Ph.D. thesis won the 2015 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in the Operations and Production Management category and the University of Twente’s Doctoral Dissertation Award. My current mixed-methods research focuses on how to lead and develop digital and green organizational transformation, incl. Industry 4.0 technology adoption, agile, lean and green.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2017 - January 2025
Publications
Publications (37)
Leaders play a key role in Continuous Improvement (CI) implementations. However, the research on CI-enabling versus CI-inhibiting leadership behaviors remains fragmented. Our research reviews, empirically validates, and extends the understanding on CI leadership behaviors by examining low vs. high maturity and capability building vs. value maximiza...
Occasionally, leaders may express incivility towards their followers. Notwithstanding
the leader’s incivility, support from the same leader may help their followers thrive. This study examined the affective mechanisms of follower thriving in the face of leader incivility. The hypotheses were built on the job demands-resources and the broaden-and-bu...
#EDIT
Full call for papers and Details on the Workshop with Authors added. Visit the "Linked data" section for more information
Background
The benefits of lean adoption in healthcare include improved process efficiency and quality of patient care. However, research indicates that lean implementation in healthcare, and specifically hospitals, is often not sustained. Furthermore, there is a need for maturity models that guide lean implementation, specifically in hospitals. Th...
Many groups in organisations are unsuccessful in problem solving. However, the principle of continuous improvement necessitates that organisations refine their employees’ problem-solving skills. In this mixed-method, field-based lab experiment, we explored the impact of a treatment to enhance the quality of group problem-solving processes.
We focus...
Purpose
This longitudinal study focuses on the specific behaviours of both top and other leaders in family firms that are implementing lean and green practices in order to contribute to the sustainability transition.
Design/methodology/approach
Over the course of two years and two months, longitudinal comparative case research was carried out with...
In Asian workplaces, effective innovative work behavior (IWB) presents challenges. Knowledge on how Asian leaders can promote employee IWB through their behavioral repertoire is needed. This assumption prompted us to develop and validate the so-called Innovative Leader Survey (ILS), covering a repertoire of leader behaviors by which employee IWB is...
Organizations practicing lean effectively show operational performance improvement through various tools, including Kaizen Events. Evidence of how measurable operational performance improvement relates to specific Kaizen Event process factors is lacking though. Building upon three organizational behavior theories, and using the six phase-based proc...
Background: The benefits of lean adoption in healthcare include improved process efficiency and quality of patient care. Research however indicates that lean implementation in healthcare and specifically hospitals is often not sustained. Furthermore, there is a need for maturity models that guide lean implementation specifically in hospitals. This...
Most studies on organizational lean transformation have been conducted in the North-Western hemisphere. This questions the cross-cultural generalizability and understanding of managers’ leadership style that is required to effectively guide lean transformations. Our mixed-methods study compares effective Brazilian to Dutch lean managers’ behaviours...
Purpose
The complexity and uncertainty of healthcare operations increasingly require agility to safeguard a high quality of care. Using a microfoundations of dynamic capabilities perspective, this study investigates the effects of nurses' implicit voice theories (IVTs) on the behaviors that influence their individual agility.
Design/methodology/ap...
Purpose
Many manufacturers are exploring adopting smart technologies in their operations, also referred to as the shift towards “Industry 4.0”. Employees' contribution to high-tech initiatives is key to successful Industry 4.0 technology adoption, but few studies have examined the determinants of employee acceptance. This study, therefore, aims to...
Purpose
With the growing need for employees to be innovative, public-sector organizations are investing in employee training. This study aims to examine the effects of a combined Lean Six Sigma and innovation training, using action learning, on public-sector employees’ creative role identity and innovative work behavior.
Design/methodology/approac...
There is an increasing scholarly focus on how and why team dynamics develop over time. However, most of the used data collection tools tend to be time-intensive and prone to biases. Hence, we developed Retrospective Team Events and Affect Mapping (R-TEAM): A longitudinal mixed-methods approach that yields a validated map of a team’s past events lin...
Implementing a new organizational strategy effectively nowadays is said to require open strategizing practices. Our study examined the adoption of three intertwined open strategizing practices in conjunction with a transformational leadership style towards effective strategy implementation.
The study was conducted within 37 geographically dispersed...
Lean implementations in hospitals tend to be lengthy or lack the desired results. In addressing the question, how can lean be implemented effectively in a hospital-wide setting, we examined two opposing approaches.
We studied two Dutch university hospitals which engaged in different lean implementation approaches during the same four-year period: t...
Purpose
Lean remains popular in a wide range of private and public sectors and continues to attract a significant amount of research. However, most of this research is not grounded in theory. This paper presents and discusses different expert viewpoints on the role of theory in lean research and practice and provides guidelines for future research....
The current global economic landscape is forcing all organizational sectors to remain relevant by innovating services, products, and work processes. Therefore, more than before, organizational leaders must enable innovative behavior of their employees. While the literature shows that transformational leadership induces innovative employee behavior,...
Why are some lean workfloor teams able to improve their already high performance, over time, and others not? By studying teams’ and leaders’ behaviour-value patterns, this abductive field study uncovers a dynamic capability at the team level.
Various methods were employed over three consecutive years to thoroughly examine five initially high-perfor...
As a problem-solving tool, the kaizen event (KE) is underutilised in practice. Assuming this is due to a lack of group process quality during those events, we aimed to grasp what is needed during high-quality KE meetings. Guided by the phased approach for structured problem solving, we built and explored a measure for enriching future KE research....
Ethical misconduct and violations seriously harm individuals and organizations and lead to massive fines or the dismissal of employees and CEOs. Many firms have implemented ethics programs to prevent unethical behavior but these are often ineffective and take a traditional approach. Ethics officers are often responsible for running and developing e...
Background:
Psychological safety is a dynamic team-level phenomenon which exists when team members believe that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. In healthcare teams, the presence of psychological safety is critical to delivering safe care. Scholars have highlighted a need for alternative measures which compliment survey-based measures of ps...
Purpose – This article examines the moderating role of Industry 4.0 technologies on the relationship between Lean Production (LP) and operational performance improvement within Brazil: a developing economy context.
Design/methodology/approach – One representative from each of the 147 studied manufacturing companies filled in a survey on three inter...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine leadership behaviors associated with lean healthcare (LH) implementation and how they develop throughout the change process.
Design/methodology/approach
After a systematic literature review of 107 peer-reviewed articles on lean leaders’ behaviors, the authors undertook a one-year mixed-methods study...
Lean Management is a managerial approach focused on enhancing customer value through the elimination of non-value adding steps from work processes. Lean Management is also enjoying a resurgence, largely because its ‘do more with less’ philosophy is particularly well-suited for the austere conditions of a 'Great Recession' recovery. Despite this res...
The success of a lean organization can, to a large extent, be traced back to its primary production units: teams at the lowest hierarchical level do a substantial amount of “value-added work”. This chapter summarizes the current behavioral findings on effective lean team dynamics and delineates new areas and OB-type approaches for future investigat...
Purpose
Although empirical tests of effective lean-team leadership are scarce, leaders are often blamed when lean work-floor initiatives fail. In the present study, a lean-team leader’s work values are assumed to affect his or her team members’ behaviors and, through them, to attain team effectiveness. Specifically, two of Schwartz et al. ’s (2012)...
Work teams go through multiple performance cycles; initially highly performing teams may experience a decline in subsequent performance and vice-versa. This inductive study focuses on team-behavioral and contextual predictors of high lean team performance. Rooted in both the IMOI model and reviewing of the extant empirical lean literature, we ident...
When work teams fail to sustain lean management methods, people frequently blame the “organizational culture.” Empirical tests of lean cultural content are nevertheless scarce. This study examined a lean team effectiveness model, comprising of relevant parts of Schwartz’s work-value theory as well as Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, and Jundt’s (2005) I...
Research shows that senior management commitment is essential to a successful and sustainable transition to a Lean enterprise but less focus has been given to the role of middle managers. This paper represents two strands of connected research that explore the behaviors and competencies of desired leaders and managers across different levels of the...
