Applying the Fuzzy Delphi Method to the Content Validity of the Female Leadership Personality Instrument

The number of female decision-makers in the public sector level remains low, suggesting that Malaysia's current policy to ensure that both the government and private sectors maintain their workforce with at least 30% female decision-makers, has not been achieved. Female personalities and behaviors that do not meet the cultural standards of strong leadership contribute to the lack of female representation in decision-making departments. Therefore, to meet the goal of 30% female decision-makers, a suggested strategy is to build an instrument that can help women identify standard leadership personality characteristics to meet those standards. In the process of building the instrument, the items need to be measured to confirm that they represent the correct characteristics. Therefore, this study, which was conducted from October to November 2020, uses the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM) to obtain the consensus of experts when determining the relevant items to measure the personality traits of female decision-makers, namely, their influence, charisma, pro-activeness, assertiveness, vision, integrity, fairness, and risk-taking. A total of 14 expert panelists were involved in this study and all data collected were analyzed using the Fuzzy Delphi method. The analysis showed that a total of 59 items met all the requirements: threshold value (d) = 0.2, a-cut value = 0.5 and agreement percentage of more than 75%. This instrument could help select female leaders for decision-making positions according to traits and characteristics, and contribute to the innovation of the FDM in assessing content validity for items that measure constructs, particularly female leadership traits.