Multicriteria analysis for benchmarking sustainability development

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to formulate the process of measuring and benchmarking the performance of sustainability development of organizations as a multi-criteria analysis problem and presents an objective approach for solving the problem in a simple manner. Design/methodology/approach – An objective approach is developed for benchmarking the sustainability development performance of individual organizations in the context of multi-criteria analysis. The relative importance of the sustainability indicators is determined independent of the subjective preferences of the decision maker using the concept of information entropy. A modified technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solutions is used for effectively incorporating the objective indicator weights into the process of determining the overall performance of sustainability development of each organization. As a result, an unbiased overall ranking of individual organizations on the performance of their sustainability development can be obtained. Findings – The proposed approach is applicable for measuring and benchmarking the performance of organizational sustainability development through the presentation of an example. Originality/value – The originality of the paper is on the development of the objective approach within the context of multi-criteria analysis for measuring and benchmarking the performance of sustainability development of individual organizations.