The mediating role of management capability in the effects of lean manufacturing practices on organizational performance: A research on the manufacturing companies in Türkiye

The purpose of this thesis is to determine whether management capability mediates the relationship between lean production practices and organizational performance. It focuses on how lean production practices and performance criteria of manufacturing sector firms in Turkey are shaped. The study aims to analyze the scope and level of lean manufacturing practices as well as organizational performance measured by Balanced ScoreCard. Another purpose of the study is to determine to what extent the management capability among the capabilities of organizations changes the effect of lean production on organizational performance. The study consists of two steps. In the first step of the study, a literature review was conducted on the concepts of lean production dimensions, management capability and organizational performance. In the second step, the relationships between the dependent, independent and mediating variables were revealed. The population of the research covers manufacturing enterprises implementing lean production in Turkey. Within the scope of the population of the research, data were collected from 393 managers at the management level in manufacturing enterprises. The data obtained within the scope of the research were analyzed with the help of SPSS and AMOS programs. Descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and path analysis techniques were used in the analysis within the scope of quantitative research design. As a result of the research, the hypothesis "management capability has a mediating variable effect on the relationship between lean production dimensions and organizational performance" was confirmed in most of the analyzed sub-dimensions and not confirmed in some of them. It was seen that there was no mediating effect of management capability on the effect of just-in-time production (JIT), kanban, single minute exchange die (SMED) on learning development performance. Similarly, there is no mediating effect of management capability on the effect of SMED, total productive maintenance (TPM) on customer performance, and similarly on the effect of 5S on financial performance. In the relationship between the other dimensions within the scope of the analysis, it is seen that management capability has a mediating effect. Finally, within the framework of the findings, some suggestions for managers and researchers are presented.