Measuring Social Sustainable Practices From employees’ Perspective: Comparative Study of Middle Eastern and Western Airlines

Abstract

Sustainability is playing a vital role in organizations worldwide, it is nearly becoming compulsory for organizations to become sustainable. With the different dimensions of sustainability, social sustainability has a direct impact on the society and mainly employees of the organization. This study concentrates on identifying, measuring and prioritizing social sustainable practices performed by organizations on their employees. Measuring social sustainability across any organization is a complex phenomenon involving many criteria and sub criteria. To address this level of complexity, a multi criteria decision-making process called the “Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP)” has been used in this research. Data have been collected from 82 experts of four Full Service Carriers (FSCs) from the Middle East and the West (Europe). The findings of this research showed that 10 main criteria and 32 sub criteria are important measures of social sustainability from the employees’ perspective. However, it has been found that employees’ wellbeing, learning, development and engagement are the most important criteria for implementing social sustainability into the airline industry for the Middle Eastern airline. However, for the Western airlines recruitment, employees’ wellbeing and employees’ engagement are the most relevant criteria from employees’ perspective. As for the criteria with the lowest priority weight, for the Middle Eastern airline community and organizational culture. And for the Western airlines it is the community and work environment have the lowest priority weights. However, the proposed framework can help policy makers to enhance the social sustainability standards of their employees and to gain a sustainable advantage. The originality of this research stems from including stakeholder’s theory, proposing a valid and reliable framework and identifying and prioritizing the social practices of airline companies in the Middle East and the West toward their employees.