Abstract

Production units’ pursuit of superior operational performance often appears under the form of a new, supposedly better, practice adopted by the production facilities. The extant literature in the operations management field has largely studied process improvement, the adoption of operational practices, by focusing on drivers and barriers as well as the effects on operational performance. Researchers have rarely investigated the contribution of operations managers in making process improvement happening. Operations managers’ behaviors are often taken for granted and, at most, classified as supporting or resisting the practice adoption. We adopt a discursive perspective to study the paradoxical behaviors that operations managers exhibit during episodes of practice adoption. We performed an interview-based research by analyzing practice adoption experiences as narrated by thirty operations managers. Our explorative, interpretivist research contributes to the behavioral operations management domain by developing a conceptual framework on operations managers’ roles for process improvement.