Understanding the psychology of sustainability through behavioral leadership fuzzy decision-making on employee motivation

During the green transformation process, assigning new job descriptions to employees, increasing workload, uncertainty, and adaptation difficulties can lead to decreased motivation and performance losses for businesses. Therefore, analyzing the impact of strategies implemented in green transformation processes on employee motivation is a critical necessity. However, a review of the literature reveals limited empirical studies and a lack of consensus on which psychological and motivational criteria are prioritized, and which strategies play a more critical role in strengthening employee motivation. This deficiency leads to uncertainty in the implementation of businesses and the failure of sustainability policies to achieve the desired impact. The primary objective of this study is to prioritize the criteria that influence employee motivation in green transformation processes and the strategies that will strengthen this motivation. Accordingly, ten different psychological and motivational criteria and five strategies are identified through the literature review. This study develops a new fuzzy decision-making model to reveal the relative importance of these criteria and strategies. In the proposed model, the opinions of five experts in the field are obtained, and the experts’ importance weights are calculated using a machine learning-based method. The method based on the removal effects of criteria (MEREC) technique is used to weight the criteria, and the combination compromise solution (CoCoSo) approach is used to rank the strategies. Furthermore, unlike the fuzzy sets in the literature, the Behavioral Leadership Fuzzy Sets define different functions based on the experts’ leadership types, integrating subjective differences in expert evaluations into the model more realistically. The proposed model contributes to the literature in three ways: (1) a more holistic management of the subjectivity problem by developing different sets based on the experts’ leadership types; (2) objectively determining experts’ importance ratings using machine learning techniques; and (3) more reliable and balanced results are provided by the CoCoSo method in ranking the strategies. The main findings of the study reveal that employee health and well-being and job satisfaction are the most critical criteria, while green workplace practices and green social responsibility projects are the top priorities for increasing employee motivation.