Exploring the Interaction Between Internal Customer Satisfaction and Talent Waste: A Lean Management Perspective

Principles of lean management have become more popular in recent years and the implementation area of Lean, spread from manufacturing environment to service sectors due to its wide applicability. Human centric structure of service sector reveals the need of lean principles which focuses on improvements related to employees. In lean thinking, elimination of wastes is one of the priority and it is essential to eliminate them for organizational enhancements. Wastes in lean were firstly defined under seven categories as transportation for manufacturing environment. However, these wastes were not found adequate, since one of the most important factor in organizations, human, was ignored. Therefore, the 8thwaste of lean was presented as “talent” in order to include the human factor and it refers to underutilization of people’s talent, knowledge, skills and abilities. As eliminating talent waste has been perceived as an important concept, it should be a significant driver of increasing internal customer satisfaction. This study aims to explore the relation between talent waste and internal customer satisfaction while considering level of top management commitment. Within this context a survey was conducted with the participation of whitecollar internal customers to understand their perception of talent waste related to their jobs. At the end of the study, it is found that talent waste partially mediates the relationship between top management commitment and internal customer satisfaction

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