Assessment of measurement models has been significantly ignored in the sustainability research domain. Consequently, many sustainability construct scales are not correctly specified which is leading to reduced scale validity. Thus, this study aims to develop scales of sustainability constructs by investigating the service sector (banking). A combination of qualitative and quantitative method approach has been employed in the study. The findings of this study reveal that e-business sustainability construct is multi-dimensional and hierarchical. The dimensions and their measurements were conceptualised and contextualised based on extensive literature review and qualitative field study. The content analysis process has been used to confirm the sustainability factors and variables.
The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) approach has been utilised for the data analysis. In the context of service sector, sustainability constructs have been found hierarchical-formative in nature.
IS researchers have investigated diverse aspects of ICT applications and practices in organizations over the last 30 years but the literature to date, has provided little assistance to the businesses which are unsure about how, where and when to respond to imperatives
for their ICT applications and practices to become sustainable (Elliot and Binney, 2008).
A few scholars have tried to link the sustainability concept to the IT/ICT domain in the name of ‘Green IT’ or ‘environmentally sustainable IT’
(e.g., Elliot, 2007; Elliot and Binney, 2008;
Houghton, 2010; Waage et al., 2003; Watson et al., 2010; Erek, 2011). However, the
current level of knowledge relating to the sustainability of e-business is limited. Some researchers tried to link the ‘sustainability’ term to the ‘e-business’ term. For example,
Daniel et al. (2004) through
exploratory study proposed a framework of the factors that
help explain the sustainability of e-marketplaces. Waage et al (2003) argue in their paper
that there is potential for IT to transform modern business into more efficient, cyclical, networked, and sustainability oriented system that pays returns through social, ecological,
and economic prosperity. While some authors, such as, Yi and Thomas (2007), propose to
identify e-business and ICT impacts on the environment, and related indicators, other
authors, such as, Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson (2009), stress the need for a sustainable
approach that considers all three equally important dimensions: social, economic, and environmental. But literature to date has not provided empirically reliable and valid measurement instrument for ICT sustainability or e-business sustainability integrating the dimensions of social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Thus, a clear research domain was needed in developing a valid measurement scale for e-business sustainability .
This necessity motivated the researchers to pursuit this study on the scale development of e-business sustainability.
*Mohammed Naim A. Dewan, Doctoral candidate, Curtin Graduate School of Business, Curtin University
Australia, Email: eijaz_2@yahoo.com
**Md. Maruf Hossan Chowdhury, Doctoral candidate, Curtin Graduate School of Business, Curtin University
Australia, Email: marufhossan@gmail.com
***Eijaz Ahmed Khan, Doctoral candidate, Curtin Graduate School of Business, Curtin University Australia,
Email: mdewan01@hotmail.com

The main objective of this research is to develop a multidimensional and hierarchical sustainability scale for measuring e-business sustainability and to investigate its ability to predict the business performance in a nomological network. The specific objectives of this paper are, firstly, to conceptualize the nature and dimensions of the e-business sustainability. Secondly, we aim to systematically develop a scale to measure e-business sustainability. Our third objective is to assess the psychometric properties of the ebusiness sustainability scale. Fourthly, we aim to examine the nomological validity of the scale by assessing its association with the business performance. Finally, the study concludes by discussing the research implications, limitations and future research directions.
E-business is the amalgamation of economic value creation and ICT (Akkermans, 2001).
Due to the growing global impact of ICT on economy, society, and ecology, firms are
increasingly extending the scope of sustainable management on the domain of ICT (Erek et al., 2009). ICT can have both positive and negative impact on the society and the
environment. Positive impacts can come from dematerialization and online delivery, transport and travel substitution, a host of monitoring and management applications, greater energy efficiency in production and use, and product stewardship and recycling; and negative impacts can come from energy consumption and the materials used in the production and distribution of ICT equipment, energy consumption in use directly and for
cooling, short product life cycles and e-waste, and exploitative applications (Houghton,
2010). In consistent with the definition of environmental sustainability of IT (Elliot, 2011),
sustainability of e-business can be defined as the activities within the e-business domain to minimize the negative impacts and maximize the positive impacts on the society and the environment through the design, production, application, operation, and disposal of information technology and information technology-enabled products and services throughout their life cycle.
The most commonly used dimensions of sustainability can be found in the triple bottom
line concept of John Elkington (1999) which considers organisational sustainability to
include three components: the natural environment, society, and the economic
performance (Dao et al., 2011). Economic development is defined as ethical, wholesome
economic growth; social development is typically referred to as corporate social responsibility and is defined as the responsibility that multinationals hold to behave fairly in their host countries and to reduce the effects of industrial development on the local communities they encounter; and environmental prudence, on the other hand, is defined as accepting our obligation to future generations to reduce our ecological footprint on
planet Earth (Beheiry et al., 2006). The “triple bottom line” served as a common ground for
numerous sustainability standards in business, such as, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI,
2011), the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (Jones, 2005), and, the sustainability metrics by
Institute of Chemical Engineers (Gripsrud et al.; Delai and Takahashi, 2011). In spite of
these, still there is a paucity of sustainability performance measurement (Ramos and
Caeiro, 2010) and it still faces some considerable challenges, such as, lack of integrated
focus for measuring economic, social and environmental aspects (Labuschagne et al.,

2005; Adams and Frost 2006). A limited number of studies (e.g., Dao et al., 2011; Elliot,
2011; Melville, 2010; Watson et al., 2010) include some aspects of the sustainability of
ICT, but empirically tested measurement of e-business sustainability in terms of social, environmental, and economic issues is very rare.
2.3.1 Social sustainability
From organizational perspective social sustainability focuses on impact of organizational activity on the stakeholders specifically, employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders
and government (Delai and Takahashi, 2011). Although profitability is essential for
business, society often has a number of other expectations. It is proposed by Carroll
(1979) that these societal expectations are in fact social responsibilities that corporations
must undertake. This can be viewed as organizations entering into a social contract that
obligates them to consider the societal interests when making decisions (Andreasen and
Drumwright, 2001). The effort to improve social responsiveness can improve the firm’s
long-term capability in terms of intangible strategic assets (Michalisin et al., 1997).
Legislation and code of conduct compliance, customers’ safety of the product, generating local employment, supporting education, health and welfare, loans and assistance to the charities, etc. are the common social sustainability factors of e-business identified in the
context of developing countries (Dewan et al., 2012).
2.3.2 Environmental sustainability
During the last 50 years, ICT have become a major contributor to business innovation and wealth generation and in making these contributions, ICT has also become a major source of environmental contamination at all stages of the technology lifecycle: design,
manufacture, operation and disposal (Elliot and Binney, 2008). The impacts of ICT on the
environment can be direct ( i.e. the impacts of ICTs themselves, such as, energy consumption and e-waste), or can be indirect ( i.e. the impacts of ICT applications, such as, intelligent transport systems, buildings and smart grids), or third-order and rebound ( i.e. the impacts enabled by the direct or indirect use of ICTs, such as, greater use of more
energy efficient transport) (Houghton, 2010). This environmental dimension of sustainability focuses on the maintenance of natural capital (Goodland, 1995). Key issues
for emerging and developing economies to achieve environmental sustainability include: access to infrastructure and ways to enable investments in smarter greener energy, transport and building infrastructures, as well as access to the broadband networks and
ICT equipment and services necessary to enable their operation (Houghton, 2010).
2.3.3 Economic sustainability
Economic sustainability evaluates short term and long term economic value generated by
the organizational activities and the corresponding relationship with shareholders (Delai and Takahashi, 2011). This dimension of sustainability emphasises on that segment of the
natural resources base which provides physical inputs, both renewable and exhaustible,
into the production process (Goodland, 1995). For example, financial capital, such as,
debt-equity, tangible capital and intangible capital need to be managed sustainably to produce maximum outputs. In other words, economic sustainability is concerned with the long term economic health of organization and accounts for share value, sales growth, profitability, such as, debt-equity, and other important indicators while maintaining social
and environmental responsibilities (Delai and Takahashi, 2011).

For the development of instrument to measure sustainability in service industry, commonly cited items in the literature under each dimension of sustainability were investigated at first by this study. Through this investigation process, t hree primary dimensions were identified that form the sustainability concept in the banking industry. The dimensions are: social sustainability, environmental sustainability, and economic sustainability. Social sustainability is mainly concerned with the employment and labour practices, legislation compliances, and contributions for local and national development . Environmental sustainability focuses on energy usages, air pollution, environmental policy and management, and commitment for future generations. Economic sustainability contains profitability, cost, sales and growth. The findings of the investigation revealed that sustainability concept is multidimensional, hierarchical. The findings also revealed that sustainability dimensions may differ context to context. Thus, an exploratory qualitative study was conducted to explore the specific dimensions and to confirm the contextual appropriateness of the primary dimensions identified in the literature.
This qualitative phase of the study attempts to explore the phenomena of sustainability to develop and enhance the dimensions, sub-dimensions and variables that were identified as part of the literature review. The qualitative method was considered as the most appropriate due to the exploratory nature of this part of the research. For the qualitative phase this study concentrated on the banking industry of Bangladesh, more specifically, this study considered e-business service of a case bank.
The benefits of e-banking are already being enjoyed by the developed countries. Apart from the developed countries, the developing countries are also experiencing sturdy
growth in e-banking (Mia et al., 2007). Bangladesh is also experiencing the similar growth
in e-banking. Among all other businesses in Bangladesh the banking sector is ahead in implementing e-businesses, which is also termed as e-banking. Currently a number of private commercial banks and foreign commercial banks in the country are offering limited services of telebanking, internet banking, and online banking facilities. As a part of the stepping forward to e-banking, the foreign commercial banks (e.g., HSBC, Standard
Chartered, Citibank N.A.) played the pioneering role with adoption of modern technology in retail banking during the late 1990s whereas the state owned commercial banks and
private commercial banks came forward with such services recently (Hasan et al., 2010).
In the first phase of the research, relevant literature was reviewed and qualitative data collected from the field study was analysed using content analysis approach to develop a measurement model for sustainability performance of the business. This method allows acquiring factual and other information as they emerge during the conversation with the participant. At the same time, this technique allows the freedom to investigate for further explanations and details in specific key areas. For the field study data, different scholars
suggested different sample size. For instance, (Creswell and Miller, 2000) suggested a
sample size of 5 to 25, whereas (Morse, 1994) recommended that the sample size should
be at least 6. For this study 11 participants from the case bank were selected for in-depth interviews. Among them 5 were branch managers, 3 were strategic managers, and 3 customer service manager of the case bank. Table 1 shows details of the participants.
Each of the interviews lasted for approximately 50-60 minutes. As with many qualitative

studies, this research used convenience sampling method to ensure productive findings
and the richest data for scale development (Zikmund et al., 2013).
To explore the practices related to the sustainability of e-business each respondents were asked a number of questions. The answers of the questions were recorded, synthesized, and categorized to identify the core dimensions with respect to e-business sustainability. In this step of the study, the respondents addressed different dimensions which indicate the multi-dimensional aspects of e-business sustainability. The respondents specified a number of social factors, environmental factors, and economic factors which are explained in the next sections. Though the dimensions were developed based on the themes identified in the qualitative study, the literature was reviewed to support our findings.
Table 1: Participants’ description
Participant Position
D1 Branch manager
D2
D3
Branch manager
Branch manager
D4
D5
D6
D7
D8
D9
D10
D11
Branch manager
Branch manager
Customer service manager
Customer service manager
Customer service manager
Strategic manager
Strategic manager
Strategic manager
3.1.1 Social sustainability factors
It has been revealed from the interviews that there are different dimensions of social sustainability factors; some of them are directly related to the products and services (e.g., accountability of the products and services, customer service excellence), while some others are not (e.g., human rights, contribution to the community). ‘Products and services responsibility’ has been strongly cited by all the respondents. ‘Contributions to local community’ of the customers have been also identified as another key concern for the customers. Employing locally and using locally supplied goods are specified for the social development of the local community. ‘Employment and labour practice’ issue has been emphasised commonly by all the respondents. Job creation through e-business services, job security, competitive salary package, health benefits for the employees and their families, training and education for the employees were identified as the main concerns by the customers. According to participant 1, health and safety management of the employee will increase the productivity of the banks since sickness of the employee will be significantly reduced. He quotes, “........ bank’s motivation for the society, job creation and job security, education and learning for the employee and society, health and safety for the employees and the customers, {........} are important to me”. All of the respondents have mentioned about the ‘compliance of legislation and code of conducts’ by the bank.
Respondents have also emphasised on ‘additional customer requirements’ issue. They

demanded more seating spaces at the branches and air conditioned environment at all of the branches. It can be revealed from Table 2 that privacy of information for the customers has been identified as another main concern.
Table 2: Social sustainability factors
Sub-
Factor
Social
Variable
Respondent
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1
0
1
1
Reference
Employment and labor practice
Products and services responsibility
Privacy of information
y y y y y y y y y y y Tanzil and Beloff (2006);
Zairi and Peters (2002)
y y y y y y y y y y y Delai and Takahashi
(2011); Poon and Lee
(2012)
y y y y - y - y y - y Zeithaml et al. (2002);
Yousafzai et al. (2003);
Bauer et al. (2004)
Contributions to local community y y y - y y y y y y y Delai and Takahashi
(2011); Nelson (1998)
Additional customer requirements
y - y y y y - y y y y Gonza´ lez et al (2004);
Molina et al. (2007)
Contribution for national development
Legislations and code of conducts compliance y y y y y - y y y y - Labuschagne et al.
(2005); Delai and
Takahashi (2011)
y y y y y y y y y y y Vinodh and Chintha
(2011); Delai and
Takahashi (2011)
Bank’s ‘contribution to social development at local and national levels’ have been highlighted by majority of the respondents. For the development at national level, learning and education for the society female encouragement and quota for disable/handicapped in the employment process, political contribution, and creating awareness by sending social messages through e-banking media and advertisements have been identified by most of the respondents. A summary of the identified social sustainability factors from the field study is demonstrated in Table 2.
3.1.2 Environmental sustainability factors
According to the opinion of the respondents ‘energy resources’ matter should be dealt with high importance when it comes to the environmental sustainability. All of the respondents have emphasised on reducing the usage of power and fuel. Regarding this issue participant 2 enumerates, “The use of generators which is polluting air and sound, can be reduced by using less ACs. Less use of generators will also save fuel.” Reduced use of
AC and lights, shut down of some ATM booths in the off-peak hours, and use of fuel efficient generators are also strongly suggested by the respondents to reduce the energy usage. Along with the energy resources, organisation’s impact on the ‘air resources’ has been cited commonly by the respondents. Since the electricity supply is not enough for any business in the country, there is frequent load-shedding every day. All of the respondents believe that air pollution from the generators can be minimised by reducing usage of AC and by using efficient generators that produce less. ‘Usage of materials’ by the bank has been recognised as one of the important environmental factors by all the respondents. Usage of materials by the bank mainly includes paper and printing related

chemicals, such as, ink, cartridge, etc. Respondents also have agreed on the fact that
“environmental policy and management’ of the organisation is very important for achieving sustainability. For the environmental policy and management most of the respondents stressed on the strategies of the company for eco management, more training of employees about environmental values, rewarding systems for eco management, and green ratings of offices based on the environmental values. A summary of the identified environmental variables from the field study is demonstrated in Table 3.
Table 3: Environmental sustainability factors
Sub-
Factor
Variable
Energy resources
Air resources
Natural
Environment
Usage of materials
Environmental legislation compliance
Environmental policy and management
Commitment for future generations
Respondent
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1
0
1
1
Reference y y y y y y y y y y y Vinodh and Chintha
(2011); Masui et al.
(2003);
y y y y y y y y y y y Labuschagne et al.
(2005); Vinodh and
Chintha (2011) y y - y y y y - y - y Tanzil and Beloff (2006);
Lin et al. (2010)
y y y - y y y - y y - Labuschagne et al.
(2005); Nikolaou et al.
(2012)
y - y y y y y y y y y Epstein and Wisner
(2001); Lo and Sheu
(2007)
y y - y y - y y y y y Beheiry et al. (2006);
Delai and Takahashi
(2011)
3.1.3 Economic sustainability factors
From the content analysis of the field study it has been revealed that profitability, reputation, productivity, costs, risk and crisis management, and investments for potential benefits have been highlighted by the respondents. Regarding the ‘profitability’ of the company participant 6 explicates, “By economic value of the bank we understand that our profitability, equity, and liquid assets have to be strong.” ‘ Economic performance’, which is comprised of technological investment, return-on-investment, revenues, and market share and growth, has been considered as another important economic value requirement for business. Another significant economic values requirement highlighted by the business respondents is the ‘cost of goods, materials, and services’.
Since banking business need strong technological platform, readiness of the organisation for risk and crisis management is very important. The respondents concurred that risk and crisis management is very crucial in e-banking. Productivity is the key for cost efficiency, according to the respondents of the organisation. It has been realised from the content analysis of the interviews that not only the common economic factors, such as, profitability, economic performance, costs, productivity, are important but also the investment for potential benefits and the reputation of the organisation have significant influence on the economic value of business. Table 4 shows the economic value requirements commonly identified by the business respondents.

Table 4: Economic sustainability factors
Sub-
Factor
Variable
Profitability
Accountability of products and services
Productivity
Economic Quality of the service
Respondent
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1
0
1
1
Reference y y y y y y y y y y y Labuschagne
et al. (2005);
Vinodh and Chintha (2011)
y y y y y y y y y y y Delai and Takahashi
(2011); Poon and Lee
(2012)
y y y y - y - y y - y Figge et al. (2002); Weske
(2012)
y y y - y y y y y y y Gonza´lez et al. (2004);
Wang and Hong (2007)
y -
y y y y - y y y y Lo and Sheo (2007);
Hoggarth et al. (2004) y y y y y - y y y y - GRI (2006); IChemE (2005)
Risk and crisis management
Costs of goods, material, and services
Investment on potential value added services
y y y y y y y y y y y Vinodh and Chintha (2011);
Mahmood and Mann
(2000)
A conceptual model is proposed based on the qualitative findings, literature support, and the derived structure of the factors of e-business sustainability to measure the dimensions and their relationship with the business performance in a nomological network (see Figure
1). We propose e-business sustainability as a hierarchical, formative model which is reflected by three dimensions (i.e., social sustainability, environmental sustainability, and
economic sustainability). Based on the decision criteria of Jarvis et al. (2003) and Petter et
al. (2007), we contend that e-business sustainability is a higher-order, multidimensional,
formative construct. The logic behind higher order formative nature of e-business sustainability model is explicated below.
Characteristics of each of the constructs of this model can be defined by their indicators.
For example, social sustainability construct of this model was formed by Employment and labor practice, Accountability of products and services, Privacy of information,
Contributions to local community and other measures which are meaningfully defining characteristics of each of this construct. Change or absence of any of these variables
would significantly cause changes in the construct. According to Magis and Shinn (2009),
safety nets (health), employment, equity, participatory decision-making are the primary requirements for the social sustainability instead of alternatives. Similarly, environmental sustainability construct was formed by Energy resources, Air resources, Usage of materials, Environmental legislation compliance, and more measures which are strongly defining the characteristics of social sustainability construct. In the same manner, economic sustainability construct was formed and profoundly defined by Profitability,
Accountability of products and services, Productivity, Quality of the service, Risk and crisis

management, and more variables. A change in any of these measures will not necessarily turn in a change in other measures. This indicates low correlations among the measures.
These findings are consistent with the findings of Petter et al. (2007) and Labuschagne et al. (2005). Petter et al. (2007) stated that constructs, such as, operational performance or
economic performance cannot be measured as reflective since each item captures a specific organisational aspect of performance and only their joint combination ‘form’ the
construct. Labuschagne et al. (2005) defined air resources, water resources, land
resources and more as the main criteria for environmental sustainability; human resources, stakeholder participation, macro-social performance and more as the main criteria for social sustainability; and financial health, economic performance, potential financial benefits and more as the main criteria for economic sustainability. Thus, aligned
with the criteria of Jarvis (2003), the measurement items under each dimension are not
interchangeable and dropping an indicator may alter the conceptual domain of the constructs. Moreover, the findings of the exploratory study confirmed the formative nature of the constructs as the correlation between measures under a construct was very low
(Bollen and Lennox, 1991). These findings are also consistent with the study of Giavanni and Vinzi (2012) who specified the social, environmental, and economic sustainability
performance as formative constructs. Gallagher et al. (2004), too, state that a series of
constructs together define the fundamental characteristics of sustainability.
In addition, previous literature supports that sustainability is a multi-dimensional hierarchical construct. Aligned with the literature, here we intend to specify e-business sustainability as multi-dimensional hierarchical construct. The study by Carter and
Jennings (2004)
also shows that sustainability is a multi-dimensional hierarchical construct. Therefore, based on the literature on sustainability it can be deduced that ebusiness sustainability can be modelled as multi-dimensional, hierarchical formative model.
Creation and purification of items through pretesting approach were completed to develop scales for the e-business sustainability dimensions (i.e. social, environmental, and economic sustainability) as identified in the qualitative study. The step to create items was completed to ensure content validity by selecting the correct items for the construct. The step to purify items was completed to confirm both content validity and construct validity by determining the convergence and divergence of items under each dimension.
5.1 Item creation
To create a set of items under each construct, items were identified using existing instruments. At the same time additional items were created through exploratory interviews. The findings from the content analysis were compared with the existing scales to match the construct definitions. To develop scales for social sustainability, environmental sustainability, and economic sustainability, most of the items were adapted
from the sustainability indices [such as, GRI (2011), IChemE (2005), and Dow Jones
(2005)] and the prior studies [such as, González et al. (2004), Vinodh and Chintha (2011),
Delai and Takahashi (2011),
Labuschagne
et al. (2005)]. The items under different
dimensions of e-business sustainability were selected using a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient or composite reliability with minimum thresh hold value of 0.60 and 0.70 respectively to
ensure the reliability of the psychometric properties (Straub et al., 2004)
. Finally, item pools were created for the three e-business sustainability dimensions followed by a

thorough examination of the existing items, elimination of redundant items, and the inclusion of new items to adjust the context for the current study.
5.2 Item purification
Based on the outcome from the above steps, a survey primary version of questionnaire was developed. Closed-ended questions were adopted while designing the questionnaire and a 6-point Likert scale (ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’) was used for the answers to measure all the dimensions and variables. The reason for choosing this scale was to avoid any central tendency error in which respondents tend to avoid using the extreme ends of the scales
(Montgomery and Asberg, 1979) and consistently rates the
middle response (e.g., ‘neutral’, ‘neither agree nor disagree’) of the scale regardless of the actual merit of the question. There were 20 items in the resulting questionnaire. The instruments that were developed was administered for pretesting to 12 respondents: 4 strategic managers, 4 accounts managers, and 4 customer service managers from the case bank. Questionnaires were sent by email with feedback form. The respondents were requested to provide suggestions regarding addition or deletion of particular question, appropriateness in sorting/classification of items under each dimension, wording and understandability. Based on the opinion of the respondents some statements and wordings in the questionnaire needed further clarification for better understanding by the respondents. All the comments from the respondents were considered in the final designing of the questionnaire. The final version of the questionnaire was then organized for the pilot study aiming to test the instrument.
6.1 Pilot study
After completing the reviews from pre-test procedure, a pilot survey was conducted with the purpose of ensuring the applicability of the data. The branch managers of the case bank were selected for data collection. Respondents were selected by convenience sampling method from the list of branches of the case bank. The respondents were initially approached via phone and they were informed about the objective of the research. Then the managers who agreed to participate in the survey were selected for data collection.
Eighty managers were communicated regarding the appointment of survey and finally fifty six managers were agreed to participate in the survey. Total fifty three usable responses were obtained for the pilot study. By means of the pilot study data we conducted the exploratory factor analysis using the varimax rotation procedure to assess the initial measurement scale. The study used Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett’s test of sphericity to evaluate the appropriateness of the factor analysis. The (KMO) test ensured the overall measure of sampling adequacy as it was 0.75 (>0.50). The Bartlett’s test of sphericity provide evidences for the validity of the instrument as it was 618.708, df = 190, significant at p = 0.000. Three factors with eigenvalues greater than 1 were extracted, and after rotation, they were 3.636, 1.678, and 1.348. The sums of squared loadings from the eight components had a cumulative value of 67.302% in explaining the total variance in data.
In evaluating the result of factor analysis, items were deleted that had loading less than
0.40 or had cross loadings greater than 0.5 with other factors. In this process, Eco6, Soc4,
Env5, and Eco4 were deleted. Cronbach’s alpha values corresponding to each construct was also examined for ensuring reliability. It revealed that Cronbach’s alpha values of the extracted three factors exceeded the minimum threshold of 0.70. For further scale

refinement corrected item–total correlation was examined to improve the reliability. No problem was identified in item total correlation results. Finally, the initial instrument was refined by removing low loading or cross loaded items. Out of 20 items the remaining 16 items were retained for the next run of factor analysis (see Table 5). The second factor analysis with a varimax rotation generated four factors based on an eigenvalue greater than 1. The refined model explained 71.603% of the cumulative variance.
Table 5: Results of the exploratory factor analysis in the pilot study
Item
1
The bank is maintaining desired economic performance (Eco1)
The bank is maintaining required efficiency of processes (Eco2)
.580
.746
The bank is maintaining competitive quality of the services (Eco3) .740
The bank is ensuring risk and crisis management (Eco4) .
594
The bank is minimising costs of goods, material, and services
(Eco5)
The bank is managing investment efficiently (Eco6)
The bank is investing enough on potential value added services
(Eco7)
The bank is maintaining desired standard in employment and labour practice (Soc1)
.
.564
125
.663
.486
The bank is maintaining full accountability of products and services for the customers (Soc2)
The bank is able to ensure privacy of information for the customers (Soc3)
The bank is fulfilling additional customer requirements (Soc4)
.031
.471
.143
The bank has enough vigilance on complying legislations and code of conducts (Soc5)
The bank is contributing enough to local community (Soc6)
.730
-.261
The bank is increasing contribution for national development
(Soc7)
The bank is using energy resources effectively (Env1)
The bank is doing its best to minimise air pollution (Env2)
.359
-.073
-.066
The bank is doing its best to minimise usages of materials (Env3) -.041
The bank is fully complying with environmental legislations (Env4) .375
The bank has a strong environmental policy and management unit
(Env5) .687
The bank is maintaining its environmental commitment for future generations (Env6) .346
Component
2
.066
.076
.310
.586
3
.482
-.033
.072
-.088
.365
-.029
.220
.340
-.015
.342
.274
-.070
-.104
.088
.600
.597
.573
.553
-.
292
.636
-.108
.170
.026
.537
.672
.639
-.
106
.523
.672
.529
-.043
.138
.361
.081
.053
.048
7.1 Summary of findings
For developing i nstrument for e-business sustainability construct, f irstly, we have conceptualised the nature and dimensions of the e-business sustainability. Secondly, we

have systematically developed a scale to measure e-business sustainability. Thirdly, we have assessed the psychometric properties of the e-business sustainability scale. The results of the study advocate that e-business sustainability is formed by three dimensions: social sustainability, environmental sustainability, and economic sustainability. In the process of developing the multi-dimensional e-business sustainability scale, we applied the qualitative and exploratory research approach.
Developing an instrument for measuring e-business sustainability in the context of banking industry of Bangladesh was the main objective of this study. Regardless of the existence of enormous studies on business sustainability, there was a scarcity of valid and reliable scale for measuring e-business sustainability. As the development of a reliable and valid scale was a fundamental goal of this study, the multi-dimensional e-business sustainability instrument developed in this study makes an important contribution to theory, method, and practice. A number of processes to empirically validate the measurement instrument supported our formulation of a multi-dimensional, hierarchical e-business sustainability scale.
7.2 Theoretical implications
Major dimensions of e-business sustainability have been identified in this study and the items of measurement have been found. In our study, we extend the knowledge on
‘sustainability’ by developing and testing a parsimonious and practical three-dimensional scale of this construct. Previous studies have used ‘sustainability’ concept hypothetically without formally defining the scale of this construct. The study identified and defined the constructs and their associated measurement items in the e-banking context of
Bangladesh. The nature of the constructs has also been defined and justified which was not available in the literature.
7.3 Practical implications
This study establishes the representative dimensions of e-business sustainability and the relevant indicators that measure each dimension.
The developed scale may serves as a managerial tool for the e-businesses to evaluate their sustainability performance and to implement proper practices, which are aimed at improving their business performance.
The study offers the managers a thoughtful consideration on the interaction of e-business sustainability and its dimensions in predicting business performance. These findings suggest that the managers shall consider e-business sustainability as an important strategic objective to ensure long-term business performance.
Most studies have their limitations and this study is no difference. The first insignificant limitation of this study is that it considered a single e-business instead of multiple businesses in developing the scale. Similar to this study, a further study on multiple ebusinesses of same type would produce more precise items of measurement for each dimension of sustainability. Secondly, this research adopts a cross sectional design which investigate the phenomenon of e-business sustainability for a particular point-in-time.
Longitudinal research design could capture the effects of e-business sustainability and business performance in the long run.

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