Can Lean management be used to harvest employee’s creativity and innovation in order to increase performance: the case of the South African tourism industry.

As a member of the emerging BRICS nations and a traveling hub for a whole continent, South Africa offers a vivid environment for tourism businesses to thrive in. The many local tourism agencies cater to a wide range of demand and work hard to offer the best products and stay above the competition. The international context they operate in offers challenges and opportunities that must be met with an innovative approach. As for any industry, innovation is sought after as a means to improve processes, products and create value. Lean is a management current that flattens the hierarchy of an organization in an effort to give all employees the power to improve a business. It does so by aiming attention on human capital and on ways to harvest its full potential. Our objective with this paper was to analyze a few actors of the tourism industry and observe their management practices in order to understand how performance was affected by the company’s approach to empowering their staff, putting an accent on innovation and creativity. We have undertaken this task in a methodological way, by first painting a theoretical landscape by virtue of a meticulous literary review. We then conducted a field study on three firms in order to gather qualitative data that would allow us to confront our theoretical findings. We have found that lean management practices were already put in place, but not always effectively implemented. Lean has a positive effect on social and human aspect mostly with an increased motivation at work, employees’ satisfaction and subsequently, improve employees’ performance. We were also able to notice that some difficulty in recruitment, as well as the turnover rate of junior employees, were some of the obstacles that obstructed innovation. We also submitted two external and one internal recommendation for future researches on the subject and for companies who want to implement lean management in the tourism industry. Our main conclusions were that lean varies according to the size of the company i.e. different from SME’s to MNE’s. The same is true for the size of the market that the company operates in. Finally, we invite future research to study lean from a more technical approach in order to complete the analysis of its effect on financial and commercial performance.