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Despite being widespread and often satisfactory in terms of improving productivity, lean management approaches face difficulties at the human resources level regarding commitment, occupational health, and employee satisfaction. Two types of implementation may be observed: lean as a set of tools or systemic lean, based on a set of principles. According to lean promoters, systemic lean should favor organizational learning. Exploring this assertion as a hypothesis may lead to recognizing the central place of human resource management in production management, where, due to a technical focus, issues of productivity and optimization predominate. Through ten case studies and 380 interviews with workers, we try to assess this assertion and its conditions using a mixed research method.