High Performance Work Practices and Kaizen: How Sustainable Are They?
A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Occupational Safety and Health".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 120118
Special Issue Editor
Interests: management; continuous improvement; lean manufacturing systems; TQM; TPM; performance evaluation and active learning in higher education
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue addresses the sustainability of high-performance work practices or kaizen, from the point of view of their long-term effects on organizations, the environment and workers’ well-being. In this way, we hope to present a set of contributions that will enable development (people, planet, and profit) to be addressed from different perspectives.
Previous research links high-performance work practices (HPWP) with reduced waste in transport or movements by improving internal or supply chain logistics (Alfalla-Luque et al., 2015; Luu, 2019). Yet it is not so clear how HIWP reduces waste in delivery times, process times, material, energy, or other resources, which would make organizations more ecologically efficient (Gollan et al., 2014; Way, 2002). However, HPWP has been proposed as a key element to encourage employees to enhance environmental performance (Govindarajulu and Daily, 2004; Renwick et al., 2013; Tariq et al., 2016).
This Special Issue is also focused on kaizen, a word that we will take as a synonym of continuous innovation or improvement (Sanchez-Ruiz et al., 2018). There is a clear relation between kaizen and environmental management or the implementation of cleaner production or green practices (Ciravegna Martins da Fonseca, 2015; Daily and Huang, 2001; Jabbour et al., 2008; Vieira and Amaral, 2016) in internal management (Fresner, 1998; Fagnani and Guimaraes, 2017; Singh et al., 2017) and with supply chain management (Dania et al., 2018) of both public and private industrial companies or service companies.
At the same time, HPWP are related to kaizen and worker participation, although the conditions under which this interaction produces positive effects or can be considered sustainable are unclear (Caniëls & Veld, 2019; Chang et al., 2018; Han et al., 2019; Siddique et al., 2019; Zhou et al., 2019) by considering its long-term contribution in workers’ well-being (Miao & Cao, 2019; Wang et al., 2019), job engagement (Karadas & Karatepe, 2019), or organizational commitment (Andersén & Andersén, 2019).
In short, we are interested in analyzing the relationship between workplace interventions and organizational well-being, employee well-being, or environmental "well-being"; the sustainability of process improvements and waste reduction; or the application of all the above in specific contexts by, for example, taking into account an organization’s size or economic activity.
Finally, we would also be interested in knowing how demographic changes (baby boomers vs. z generation vs. millennials), technological changes (big data, digitization, industry 4.0), economic changes (job precariousness), or how the emerging values of the last decade (inclusion, innovation, critical reflection) affect the relation linking HPWS, kaizen, and sustainability.
Contributions related, but not limited to, the aforementioned topics will be included in this Special Issue.
Dr. Juan A. Marin-Garcia
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- high performance
- continuous process improvement
- waste reduction
- Sustainability
- long-term effects
- organizational well-being
- employee well-being
- environmental “well-being”
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