Date of Award

Spring 5-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Technology Management

Department

Applied Engineering and Technology Management

First Advisor

Christopher Kluse

Abstract

There are many challenges that higher education institutions (HEI) are facing that include rising cost of education, reduction in student population, competition from other universities and alternative educational platforms, as well as reduction in public confidence. To stay competitive, HEIs could utilize performance improvement methods that have been proven to be advantageous in manufacturing and other industries, and one of these methodologies is Lean. Application of Lean in higher education is still in the early stages of development, the methods have been mostly used to improve administrative processes, but not as much in the core educational processes, teaching and research. Articles and studies related to Lean implementation tend to focus on the application of tools and concepts while paying little to no attention to the attitudes of employees towards change with Lean implementation. To understand faculty perception, three goals were pursued. First, an estimate was obtained on the percentage of faculty familiar with Lean principles. Second, a survey was used to assess how ‘lean’ faculties’ current professional activities are based on faculty perspective. Finally, faculty perception of a selection of Lean principles was assessed and compared for those faculty familiar with Lean versus those without Lean knowledge using hypothesis testing. Knowing faculty attitudes towards Lean might help universities prepare for a change and reduce resistance to change. This research was conducted using quantitative research methods, and a survey design was used to collect the data. The survey was distributed among full-time faculty of US higher education institutions in the Midwest region, which included 12 states and 126 universities. Overall, 8,297 faculty out of total 85,520 faculty in the region were selected using a simple random sampling method, and they received an invitation to participate in the survey. A total of 476 responses were received, out of which 418 were valid. As a result, it was estimated that 13.4% of faculty are familiar with Lean. Also, responses to survey questions allowed assessing faculty evaluations of a selection of Lean principles as it relates to their institutions. The results indicate that faculty recognize leadership’s focus on student success, but there is also a lack of guidance and direction from immediate leadership. Faculty members are strongly focused on student success, have the autonomy to solve problems and can identify wasteful activities, but are lacking time for improvement efforts and lacking knowledge of standardized improvement approaches. Additionally, Spearman’s rank-order correlation analysis revealed several statistically significant correlations between faculty demographics data and some of the survey questions. The level of Lean expertise resulted in 10 positive correlations and overall more favorable views about Lean concepts. Finally, the perception of Lean was compared between a group of faculty members with no expertise in Lean and a group with a certain level of Lean expertise using hypothesis testing using a t-test. The hypothesis testing was performed for four statements in the “Perception of Lean and its principles” category of survey questions, and for two of them the null hypothesis was rejected, while for the other two the researcher failed to reject it. The results of this study could be beneficial for the purposes of Lean implementation planning. Specifically, the results could help to estimate training efforts and identify possible immediate areas that need improvement, as well as highlight the effect that certain university features and faculty demographic information can have on the perception of Lean principles.

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