Why Hospitality Workers Go Green: It Takes More Than Personal Values

Every plate of food that leaves a hotel kitchen carries a hidden environmental price. Food waste in the hospitality sector drives unnecessary resource consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, mounting operational costs, and relentless pressure on waste-management systems. For years, sustainability researchers and industry managers alike have treated this problem as fundamentally psychological: if employees simply cared more about the environment, they would waste less. A new systematic literature review published in Discover Sustainability by Thuy An Truong, Amila Kasun Sampath Udage Kankanamge, Michael Odei Erdiaw-Kwasie, and Matthew Abunyewah of Charles Darwin University dismantles that assumption with unusual precision. Effective engagement in food waste reduction, the authors find, is shaped by the interaction of micro, meso, and macro level factors rather than being limited to individual behavioural traits.

The review, which followed the PRISMA reporting guidelines for systematic literature synthesis, began with systematic searches of the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Those searches identified 21 peer-reviewed empirical studies, and an additional eight studies were located through snowballing, a technique in which the reference lists of relevant papers are mined for further eligible research. The final sample comprised 29 studies published between 2016 and 2025. From this evidence base, the team constructed an integrated multilevel framework showing how behavioural, organisational, technological, and institutional conditions collectively influence food waste management practices in hospitality operations. The framework is deliberately holistic: it treats the employee not as an isolated decision-maker but as a worker embedded in a kitchen, a company, an industry, and a regulatory environment, each layer exerting its own gravitational pull on behaviour.

At the micro level, the review identifies environmental awareness and cognitive understanding as foundational determinants of pro-environmental behaviour. Limited environmental knowledge constrains sustainable behaviour in both workplace and personal contexts, and sustained behavioural change requires employees to understand the practices associated with high environmental impacts. Access to sustainability knowledge, information, and resources strengthens positive attitudes toward sustainable practices by enhancing perceived feasibility and usefulness, a mechanism rooted in behavioural science: people are far more likely to act on attitudes when they believe the action is actually achievable. The review also highlights moral responsibility and environmental values, noting that employees whose personal values align with sustainability are more committed to green workplace practices. Motivation reinforces environmental identity and contributes to positive behavioural spillover effects, the phenomenon in which one sustainable action increases the likelihood of further sustainable actions.

Yet the micro level is not a simple story of virtue. The review documents how motivation can be undermined by workplace design. Chefs often demonstrate strong task motivation shaped by professional values, family traditions, and respect for food resourcefulness, and creative culinary practices can improve both resource efficiency and food quality simultaneously. But rigid managerial systems, including highly standardised recipes and inflexible operational policies, can reduce employees’ autonomy to implement sustainable practices. This finding carries real technical weight for organisational psychologists: autonomy is a core component of self-determination theory, and stripping it away through over-standardisation converts willing environmental actors into passive rule-followers. Inaccurate understanding of the environment remains a persistent barrier, meaning that even motivated workers can behave unsustainably when their mental models of environmental impact are wrong.

The meso level, encompassing organisational determinants, emerges as the review’s richest territory. Training provides employees with the operational knowledge and skills needed to sustain food waste reduction practices, and culinary education built around wasteless cooking strengthens both environmental awareness and practical competencies. Integrating the environmental urgency of food waste into training strengthens employees’ moral responsibility and collective accountability, transforming waste reduction from a technical task into a shared professional norm. Innovation-oriented and problem-solving approaches support adaptive waste-reduction strategies, while participatory, bottom-up sustainability initiatives involving workshops and collaborative learning strengthen employee engagement. Awareness initiatives targeting senior chefs and business owners can shape professional sustainability norms from the top of the professional hierarchy downward, a top-down signalling route that complements the bottom-up engagement route.

Leadership influence and environmental role modelling constitute a second meso cluster with substantial explanatory power. Managers and senior chefs who actively promote sustainability establish workplace norms supporting environmentally responsible behaviour. Green leadership strengthens a sustainability-oriented organisational culture and serves as a signalling mechanism that encourages employees’ pro-environmental behaviour, and continuous sustainability learning among managers is also important, since leaders cannot model what they have not learned. Food waste reduction training is often integrated within broader green communication programs that reinforce sustainability awareness and organisational norms, embedding the message in everyday communication rather than confining it to occasional campaigns. Visible managerial support and clear communication strengthen engagement with clean technologies and food waste management initiatives, and supportive implementation processes are essential for successful technology adoption, a finding consistent with diffusion-of-innovation research showing that perceived organisational backing determines whether new tools are actually used.

Organisational support and resource availability form the third meso pillar. Reinforcing employees’ environmental identity through recognition, rewards, and meaningful work strengthens sustainability engagement and employee well-being, and the review notes that employees increasingly seek purpose-driven roles that contribute positively to society and environmental sustainability. Food waste reduction requires the institutionalisation of waste-conscious practices within kitchen culture and operational routines, meaning that sustainability must become routine rather than exceptional. The review also exposes a hard physical constraint that is often overlooked in behavioural models: limited kitchen space and operational constraints reduce the feasibility of waste sorting and food waste management practices during peak service periods. A worker cannot sort waste that there is no room to sort, no matter how strong their values are.

At the macro level, the review situates hospitality behaviour within broader contextual forces. Regulatory pressures and environmental compliance requirements encourage hospitality organisations to adopt sustainable operational practices, and governments should strengthen corporate social responsibility oriented policies and regulations encouraging food waste separation and sustainable hospitality practices. Market demand and consumer sustainability expectations introduce a structural tension: encouraging customers to reduce overordering may conflict with sales incentives and customer satisfaction expectations, creating friction between sustainability and commercial performance. Perceived environmental risks and sustainability threats strengthen organisational support for circular-economy practices and climate-action initiatives, suggesting that the visibility of environmental danger can itself mobilise institutional resources behind worker behaviour.

The practical implications of this multilevel framework are direct for hospitality managers and policymakers seeking to embed sustainable food waste reduction within operations. Interventions that target only one layer are likely to fail, because the layers interact: training without kitchen space is futile, values without leadership signalling wither, and regulation without organisational support remains symbolic. The review advances hospitality sustainability research toward a more holistic understanding of employee-driven sustainability behaviour, and its authors argue that worker engagement in food waste reduction depends on the interaction among organisational practices, technological capabilities, infrastructure, institutional requirements, and broader industry conditions. The message for the industry is stark and liberating at once: the greenest worker in the building is still only as sustainable as the system around them allows.

Subject of Research: Multilevel determinants of pro-environmental behaviour among hospitality workers

Article Title: Multilevel determinants of pro-environmental behaviour among hospitality workers

Article References: Truong, T. A., Kankanamge, A. K. S. U., Erdiaw-Kwasie, M. O., & Abunyewah, M. (2026). Multilevel determinants of pro-environmental behaviour among hospitality workers. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04860-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04860-9

Keywords: Multilevel, determinants, pro-environmental, behaviour, hospitality, workers, scientific research