The first and fifth blocks were related to the
demographics of the respondents and characteristics
of their firms. The second, third and fourth blocks
referred, respectively, to the constructs: Lean
Manufacturing with 23 indicators, Competitive
Skills with 20 indicators and Business Performance
with 9 indicators. In these blocks, the respondents
were asked to choose their degree of agreement on
a Likert scale ranging from Totally Disagree (TD
= 1) to Totally Agree (TA = 6). Finally, the sixth
block referred to an open question that respondent
could fill up and include additional information not
covered by the structured questions.
It is important to establish that the questionnaire
raises the perception or opinion of the respondent
at any given time about management characteristics
and about company’s results. Evidently, the
questionnaire responses may differ from the
true values of the constructs analyzed bringing
challenges to the empirical analysis.
Despite this limitation, it is argued that the
questionnaire may also provide important insights
into the perceptions of managers. Moreover,
other metrics, primarily associated with financial
performance, as profit, could be difficult to obtain,
due to the level of disclosure of information that
the company would be willing to accept. Because
there are several privately held companies in the
sample, financial performance information would
be difficult to access and therefore we chose to
collect opinion or estimates of managers on some
performance metrics of their companies.
After defining and pre-testing the final version of the
questionnaire, we selected a sample of firms drawn
from the Brazilian Lean Institute, which comprises
companies that practice lean manufacturing in the
country. Before forwarding the questionnaires to
prospective respondents, we sent an email explaining
the research, including the option to complete the
survey in an attached file or by accessing a website
with an online form. Additionally, to expand the
scope of our sample, we also sent invitations to
members of LinkedIn communities related to lean
manufacturing and asked them to answer the survey
available online.