Clustering and Discriminant Analysis of Public Organizations in Terms of Green Management

In the last decade, the most important philosophy agreed upon in organizations has been environmentalism that can help them to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by improving their reputation and position. A very important tool for organizations to achieve this goal is to observe the importance of green management practices. The main purpose of this study is to provide a clustering and conducting a discriminant analysis of public organizations in terms of performance in green management and its components. This study is applied in terms of purpose, and regarding method and nature is a descriptive survey. The statistical population of this study consists of the public organizations of city of Bushehr, which were selected using simple random sampling method. Finally, 74 organizations were selected as sample members. A researcher-made questionnaire was used for data collection. The validity and reliability of measures were confirmed employing content analysis method and Cronbach's alpha method, respectively. In this study, nine influential components in green management were identified by studying the theoretical foundations, literature reviewing and examining the main documents. Then, collected data were analyzed by genetic algorithms, K-means and discriminant analysis. The results show that public organizations, participated in this study, are in the "action-oriented" and "reactionary" clusters from the perspective of green management, and the proposed predictive function has a very high power in distinguishing organizations. In terms of contribution, this study has clustered public organization from a new perspective.