Finding more prominent leadership traits to achieve a sustainable organization using the AHP method

Abstract

Prioritizing the enhancement of people's quality of life and environmental concerns have become crucial issues for organizations who want to survive into the twenty-first century. Social, political, environmental, and technological paradigms are constantly changing and these unstable contexts have deeply affected organizations. Overcoming political unrest, social inequalities, and inexorable exploitation of natural resources, have forced organizations to require new thoughts and actions; organizations can only remain in existence if they prioritize being environmentally and socially aware. This awareness acquired by organizations has been created thanks to the United Nations' considerable efforts, namely, the Stockholm Conference, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Bruntland Commission, The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), Earth Summits and lastly Paris Climate Agreement-Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) over the years. Miscellaneous standards and initiatives that comprise environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics have been created for organizations to be more conscious. The most fundamental standard is the ISO 9001 Quality Management System (QMS), which provides a blueprint for organizations to meet their quality requirements, paving the way for all of the ESG topics to be covered. The ISO 9001 QMS has fundamental principles that are closely related to sustainability issues like 'engagement of people', 'improvement', 'process approach', and 'leadership'. Moreover, experts, scholars, and researchers have deemed that endorsement and leadership of top managers are crucial in QMS, and leaders who have 'transformational leadership' traits will thrive leading sustainability topics. Within the scope of this thesis, we have scrutinized transformational leadership traits as criteria and its' 16 subcriteria. We have developed an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model regarding transformational leadership traits and its sub-criteria that was appraised by 10 respondents. The respondents group has incorporated sustainability consultants, experts, and managers and they have wanted to find pre-eminent manager traits for their organization. Respondents evaluated that survey which asked, "Which of the leadership traits is considered more important and how much more?". We expected to find the relative importance of the criteria and sub-criteria by the respondents during the finding prominent leadership traits process. At the end of the AHP model calculation, we ordered the weights made by the respondents based on how significant they were. According to the survey results and the AHP model calculations we have provided, 'inspirational motivation' has more importance with 55% value than the other leadership traits. Furthermore, as being sub-criteria 'cultivating a creative work environment', 'articulating followers' vision', and 'using motivational concepts' leadership traits were distinguished behavioral components of leaders. This thesis aimed to find leaders' prominent attitudes by asking selected respondents 'which behavioral components of transformational leadership take a prominent place in achieving a sustainable organization.