Evaluating port managers primary competencies in terms of port's sustainability performance

Sustainability in business enterprises is an increasingly important concept with its economic, environmental and social dimensions. These enterprises have to push up sustainability performances to overcome the competition conditions and to get an advantage in the market. Besides other dimensions of sustainability performance, port enterprises have to pay attention to the environmental dimension due to environmental threats and total sustainability objectives. Considering the environmental interaction of the port enterprises, the operational activities become important and as responsible for these activities the port operations manager's competencies become more important. This study aims to evaluate the port operations manager's primary competency criterias in terms of the environmental sustainability performance of ports engaged in container transport. A four-phased methodology process was followed in this context. First, qualitative content analyses were carried out regarding manager competencies, and in second stage these competency criteria were diminished via structured interviews (n=5). At third stage, a three-phased Delphi process has been carried out to find out the competencies related to the environmental sustainability performance, and finally priority levels of those competency criteria obtained through the Analytic Network Process (ANP) (n=6). According to the findings, 15 primary competency criterias of port operations manager were identified in terms of port environmental sustainability performance and "management skill" appeared as the top primary one. According to the competency classification; the priority levels of competencies belong to the technical competencies cluster were found higher than competencies in other clusters (business, information management and leadership competencies). As the technical competencies cluster contains mostly the port-related competencies, this finding points out the differences of competencies among different sectors and the consensus with the Viitala's (2005) hierarchical model of management competencies that this study based on. This is an original study in aspect of determining/evaluating port operations manager's competencies in terms of environmental sustainability performance. Studies on other dimensions of sustainability performance, ports handling other types of cargoes and different level of managers can be useful to eliminate the lack of literature and comparing the results with this study.