Low-carbon tourism strategy evaluation and selection using interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy additive ratio assessment approach based on similarity measures.

Recently, the assessment and selection of most suitable low-carbon tourism strategy has gained an extensive consideration from sustainable perspectives. Owing to participation of multiple qualitative and quantitative attributes, the low-carbon tourism strategy (LCTS) selection process can be considered as multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. As uncertainty is usually occurred in LCTSs evaluation, the theory of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IVIFSs) has been established as more flexible and efficient tool to model the uncertain decision-making problems. The idea of the present study is to develop an extended method using additive ratio assessment (ARAS) framework and similarity measures in a way to find an effective solution to the decision-making problems using IVIFSs. The bases of the proposed method are the IVIFSs operators, some modifications in the traditional ARAS framework and a calculation procedure of the weights of the criteria. To calculate criterion weight, new similarity measures for IVIFSs are developed aiming at the achievement of more realistic weights. Also, a comparison is demonstrated to the currently used similarity measures in order to show the efficiency of the developed approach. To confirm that the developed IVIF-ARAS approach can be successfully employed to practical decision-making problems, a case study of LCTS selection problem is considered. The final results from the developed approach and the extant models are compared for the validation of the proposed approach in this study.

How does organizational leadership contribute to the firm performance through social responsibility strategies?

Despite the wide-ranging studies on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), firm performance, and Organizational Leadership (OL), there have been only a few studies examining the inter-relationship between them. Accordingly, this investigation has tried to investigate how OL contributes to the firm's performance through the CSR strategies. It has an internal orientation to CSR motivations compared to the existing studies that mostly considered the external factors in implementing of CSR in firms; also, it has a comprehensive view toward the firm's performance by considering both financial and non-financial aspects of performance. It could be said that this study has tried to answer the question of whether or not CSR can be as a mediator between the OL and firm performance. Data collection was performed from 285 manufacturing and consumer products firms located in Malaysia during the four-month period of June-September of 2020. AMOS Structural Equation Modeling (AMOS-SEM) method was applied to analyze the model. Following the Baron and Kenny approach in testing the hypotheses, it was found that the relationships of OL and financial performance, as well as OL and non-financial performance were partially mediated by CSR. In addition, the non-financial performance was found as a full mediator between the OL and financial performance. Further, the results revealed two full mediated relationships in this way that non-financial performance was a full mediator variable between CSR and financial performance, as well as CSR and non-financial performance which were found as two multiple full mediators between OL and financial performance. The results help Malaysian managers to understand their current status, capabilities, strong points and weaknesses in leadership regarding to CSR. Moreover, due to the positive effects of CSR on both firm's financial and non-financial performance, CSR is recommended to be integrated in leadership style and the organizational strategies in order to having better performance.