An analysis between Soft Lean practices and waste of knowledge in higher education institutions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21527/2237-6453.2026.64.16139Keywords:
Lean, Soft Lean Practices, Knowledge lossAbstract
Knowledge is of great importance to organizations and, therefore, it is essential to ensure that it is not lost or wasted. This study aims to evaluate the relationship between Soft Lean practices and knowledge waste in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The research has a quantitative approach by carrying out a survey. The questionnaire was administered online, obtaining 837 responses. As main results, it was identified that private and community HEIs presented higher averages for factors related to Soft Lean practices. In public HEIs, in turn, a higher incidence of wasted knowledge was identified. Furthermore, it was identified that Soft Lean practices and the loss or waste of knowledge have significant, predominantly negative correlations between them, so that “management leadership” with the “loss of tacit knowledge” and “continuous improvement” with the “loss of tacit knowledge”, resulted in the highest correlations, significant and negative, presented in the analyses. Among the factors of Soft Lean practices, “management leadership” presented the highest negative correlation with the loss or waste of knowledge, while “employee/servant involvement” was the factor that was least correlated. In short, based on the participants' perception, it was identified that the greater the incidence of Soft Lean practices within HEIs, the lower the occurrence of loss or waste of knowledge.
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