Human resource management as an internal antecedent of environmental management: a joint analysis with competitive consequences in the hotel industry

Abstract

Firm success depends on economic performance, but also on social and environmental factors. We use abilities, motivations, and opportunities theory and resource-based view to analyse the role of human resources management (HRM) as an antecedent of environmental management and how this relationship contributes to a deeper understanding of the linkage between environmental management and performance. This is because there are no conclusive results of the costs and profits derived from environmental practices and HRM could add more information to this topic. Here, we show that a set of HRM practices, and specially employee participation processes and communication between managers and employees, significantly improves environmental management. Moreover, environmental management explains significantly competitive advantages and performance in the hotel industry. Findings show that hotels should have an HRM structure to train, motivate, develop, and retain employees to develop environmental management aimed at obtaining cost and differentiation advantages and improve their perceptual performance, average daily rate, and revenues per available room. Our findings have implications towards advancing theory because we develop an integrative framework which includes the link between HRM (antecedent) and environmental management, and the relationship between environmental management and competitive advantages and performance (consequences) in the hotel industry.