Assessment of corporate culture in sustainability performance using a hierarchical framework and interdependence relations

Abstract

There is a gap in the extant literature on what corporate cultural attributes drives toward corporate sustainability performance. This study investigates corporate culture attributes that are conducive for sustainability and forms these attributes as a measurement tool for assessing corporate sustainability performance using linguistic preferences. Most of the prior assessment frameworks use composite attributes which cannot handle subjective perceptions, however, sustainability issues are multi-dimensional and requires subjective judgements and linguistic preferences. Additionally, corporate sustainability performance is highly dependent on cultural aspect. Therefore, this study forms a measurement structure using cultural attributes to evaluate corporate sustainability performance. This study integrates the fuzzy synthetic evaluation and a decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) approach to address the interdependence relation among attributes in a hierarchical structure. The proposed framework is tested to show the reliability and validity. The proposed framework is able to identify over all sustainability performance as well as is able to draw specific managerial implications. The result reveals that overall corporate sustainability performance is low, and a poorer performance is found with regard to social responsibility. The study contributes in the literature by presenting a hierarchical assessment framework for understanding corporate sustainability performance.