Corporate sustainable performance assessment based on fuzzy logic

Abstract

Creativity leads to society's development and is a fundamental factor associated organizational innovative process. Although innovation has an important influence on consumption behavior this is in conflict with the sustainability principles. Nowadays, sustainability has become a critical issue for corporations' development, because they interact with their environment, and become affected by it. An analysis of this interaction allows the assessment of the influencing factors on corporate sustainable performance. These results are useful to all stakeholders' decision making processes. The purpose of this paper is to propose a suitable methodology in order to improve the corporate sustainability management. To achieve the research results, the research design is based on fuzzy logic, in order to assess the corporate sustainable performance of a representative European automotive company ranked in the top 10 worldwide by Forbes in 2017. The research takes into account the influence of corporate environmental performance and corporate financial performance on the corporate sustainable performance. The research methods are based on principal component analysis, in order to identify the new corporate environmental performance and corporate financial performance components and the fuzzy logic to assess their influence on the corporate sustainable performance. Research results indicate that the fuzzy model represents a suitable tool to provide a comprehensive analysis on the corporate sustainable performance based on environmental and financial components. The link between corporate environmental performance and corporate financial performance is an innovative approach that uses linguistic variables and linguistic rules to provide quantitative measures of corporate sustainable performance.