Prioritizing sustainable practices of service organizations: an empirical evidence from automobile dealers in UAE

Abstract

This paper introduces sustainability to the field of service companies, expands the conceptualization of sustainability beyond the triple bottom line to consider key supporting facets which are posited to be requisites to sustainable practices and finally implements the proposed framework in the automobile industry in United Arab Emirates (UAE). This research is designed by decomposing complex and unstructured sustainability issues into a set of components organized in a multilevel hierarchical form. To deal with this complexity of multi criteria decision making process, Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) method is used in this research. The authors introduced a framework of sustainability for service organizing- the integration of integration of environmental management, social responsibility, customer management, economic management and health and safety practices. It has been found that automobile service providers in UAE are giving more importance to environmental management and social responsibility.External factors (Government regulations, policies and culture) also affect the sustainable practices of an organization. Hence, future work should incorporate these parameters as well. This is a contribution to the continuing research into sustainability, giving managers and designers a practical way for measuring and implementing sustainability practices across service organizations. The contribution of this research, through successive stages of data collection, measurement analysis and refinement, is a set of reliable and valid framework that can be subsequently used in conceptualization and measuring sustainability in the service industries.