Responding to the call for papers, we study the daily work practices of managers at a very strong Lean Production organization and reveal a pattern of practices used by managers in daily work. This pattern of management communication practices is consistent across the organization’s manufacturing sites. We then examine archival qualitative data from seven different sources in a deductive theory-testing mode, and confirm the existence of the identified practices in other organizations.

An essential part of many forms of LP is that participants are all involved in improvement activities. The collaborative nature of these activities raises the importance of management communication practice as the sole lubricant between managers and workers which enables these activities.  

We find that the identified communications practices were consistently found in embedded LP environments and the opposite practices were found in weak LP and in US-style environments.