Corporate sustainability measurement based on entropy weight and TOPSIS

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to measure Garanti Bank’s corporate sustainability performance along with the main indicators of economic, social and environmental factors, taking into consideration of the governance indicators. Design/methodology/approach Recent global economic developments indicate that the main corporate sustainability indicators of economic, environmental and social factors are insufficient for the sustainability practices of the companies. Along with these indicators, a good administrative structure should be evaluated as a whole to measure the sustainability performance. For measuring corporate sustainability performance of the bank along with the economic, environmental, social and governance dimensions of corporate sustainability, content analysis, entropy and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods are used with a total of four corporate sustainability reports published by Garanti Bank within the period of 2010-2014. Findings The results depict that the sustainability performance of Garanti Bank tends to increase during the time span. Among all dimensions, economic dimension has the highest impact on overall sustainability performance, as it has the highest weight in entropy. On contrary, governance dimension has the lowest impact on overall performance. Research limitations/implications This paper has implications in enhancing the understanding of corporate sustainability measurement both using content analysis, and TOPSIS particularly in a developing country, although it is limited by the size of the corporate sustainability reports and time span. Originality/value This paper attempts to reveal an emerging banking sector specific corporate sustainability materiality. This is the first study in Turkey which includes both qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques considering the content analysis and TOPSIS.