The Intricate Relationship of Employee Engagement and Lean Approach toward Quality Improvement of the Public Hospitals

The lean approach is a value-added system that reduces cost and waste to continuously improve the quality performance of the healthcare organization. The present study investigates the relationships of the lean approach with top management team and employee engagement toward quality improvement of the public hospitals in Malaysia. This study used stratified random sampling to collect data from the public hospitals' staff who were directly involved with patient services. In this study, PLS-SEM 3.3.4 was applied to measure the research constructs and hypotheses. The research findings indicate that the lean approach has a significant relationship with the top management team and employee engagement to positively impact the quality improvement of the public hospital. However, research findings also indicate that the top management team has no significant influence on quality improvement in public hospitals, but it has an indirect effect through the lean approach and employee engagement. The findings of the study will provide guidelines on how the lean approach contributes to the body of knowledge and practical implications to continuously improve the quality performance of public healthcare system.