Abstract

Many organizations have been adopting the so-called Lean Production; some have achieved the benefits of such adoption, but others have not. The failures have been attributed to different root causes—organizational culture, top management and employees’ involvement, and resistance to change being the most cited reasons. Organizational culture is a crucial point, as organizations need to implement Lean Production not only as a methodology but also as the culture that underlies that type of production, i.e., Lean Thinking. This article develops a systematic literature review whose main purpose is to gather evidence that Lean Thinking should be recognized and understood as an Organizational Culture. The systematic literature review should answer to the question: “Is Lean Thinking an Organizational Culture?” The systematic literature review collected 675 articles from the Web of Science and Scopus databases and, after screening, 658 full text articles were selected for assessment. After application of the exclusion criteria, only 130 articles were used for a qualitative synthesis through a content analysis. From these, eighty-four answered the question above and were the object of a quantitative synthesis. In this synthesis, the authors used the elements of the culture levels of Schein’s definition to qualify the articles found. Key findings of this research show that many authors present elements of Lean Thinking as an Organizational Culture. Organizations willing to implement Lean Thinking must be aware of this and define a robust structure, starting with a long-term vision aligned with specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely operational goals.