ESG practices through the lens of employees in hospitality: Insights from employee-generated data

Abstract

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices are garnering increased attention from hospitality companies, accompanied by a notable rise in awareness and expectations from key stakeholders. Nevertheless, research exploring how internal stakeholders perceive ESG initiatives and how such perceptions affect them is still scarce. This paper attempts to shed light on this area by analyzing 195,530 employee online reviews from 4182 U.S. hotel companies over 15 years. We measure employees’ perceptions of ESG practices by constructing a novel ESG lexicon using a word-embedding approach. Our results reveal that (a) employees’ perceived ESG practices increase gradually over the years, (b) perceived ESG practices are higher among current (vs. former) employees and managers (vs. non-managers), and increase with organizational tenure, (c) perceived ESG practices are related to higher job satisfaction and lower employee turnover, with organizational tenure and position level moderating these relationships.