Kaizen costing as a culturally-based tool: a Portuguese case-study

In the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese success was explained by its culture, and entrepreneurs from the West realised that productivity is not reducible to rationalism and technology. Indeed, nowadays it is well recognised that what best distinguishes an organisation from its competitors are not physical and tangible characteristics. Intangible dimensions, like organisational culture, play an important role in organisational success or failure. This research argues that organisational culture interacts with kaizen costing so that effective implementation of kaizen requires a special organisational cultural puzzle. A qualitative approach was adopted. The case study method was used to understand how kaizen costing interacts with organisational culture. The findings suggest that effective implementation of kaizen costing requires a high level of culture coherence. Further research is necessary before we can consistently generalise our conclusion. However, our findings bring new insights to the role of low-level workers in effective implementation of strategic options like kaizen and highlight the importance of intangible assets like organisational culture. This article draws attention to the tenuous frontier between kaizen costing and lean production, and it puts organisational culture on the centre.