Abstract
Nowadays many companies deal with lean: some of them have a consolidated lean adoption, others are facing the lean transformation and many others are combining lean with the newest strategies. In all these contexts, the key resource is the human factor and utmost attention should be put to its interface with the organization. This study aims to clarify the link between lean and human resource management (HRM) or organizational behaviour (OB) depicting an overview of the body of literature devoted to their intersection. Two bibliometric tools allowed to examine literature in a dynamic and quantitative way. In particular, the citation network analysis, through the main path analysis, identified the development trajectory of the topic, while the analysis of author keywords co-occurrence network distinguished the different research areas within it. As first result, two main development trajectories were identified: one devoted to the central role of the HR practices included in the “High involvement work systems” to obtain a successful lean implementation; the other one to the clarification of the core nature and patterns of lean when combined to HRM or OB. The second result is the distinction of five different research areas: Lean and BIM – collaboration centrality, Teamwork and lean practices, Training in lean six sigma, Lean leadership and kaizen benefits. Finally, the literature analysis highlighted the need of more cross-fertilization between the fields.