Crisis Management Performance of Upscale Hotels in the Greater Bay Area, China: A Comparative Study in a Complex Institutional Situation

Abstract

This study explores upscale hotel crisis management from the institutional environment perspective. Integrating the institutional and resource dependence theories, this study established a framework to investigate and compare the organizational crisis performance of state-owned and private-owned hotels in China. Specifically, data were collected in the Greater Bay Area. The hotels from Macau represent the private-owned samples (n = 247), while the hotels from Guangzhou and Shenzhen are the state-owned samples (n = 225). The results showed that the institutional environment significantly influences upscale hotels’ organizational crisis performance. For example, the organizational climate has more effect on crisis performance in SOHs than POHs, while dynamic capability has more impact on the POHs than SOHs. Moreover, the results also showed that the path from an organization’s commitment to their crisis performance illustrated the most significant difference between those two samples. This study provided a novel perspective to explore two different social systems (socialism vs. capitalism) in upscale hotel crisis performance and management. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.