Lean leadership in India: transforming the transactional challenges with mature followership

Lean is an accepted management philosophy in the Indian Industry deeply rooted in many industry segments since its initial adoption by the TVS group in 1985 (Prashar, 2014). Lean leadership is a specific set of leadership attributes to realize the lean outcome by leaders’ self-transformation and promote meaningful followership among their subordinates to meet common corporate objectives. This assumes significance for a traditional country like India, surviving with a vibrant ethos, rich cultural heritage and unique socio-economic patterns for more than two and a half millennia. Indian people are living by their cultural ethos. The Indian ethos advocates wholesomeness both among leaders and followers, togetherness in the workplace, a sustained decision-making system with approval of all parties concerned and larger societal impact from organizations than achievement of merely short-term commercial goals. The gap is found from the literature questions on how lean leaders from India can motivate their followers to break their limitations and how both leaders and followers get benefited from the Indian ethos. This review explores 793 journal articles from prominent databases. This study provides guiding principles to enhance the lean leader’s decision-making process.