Green HR Practices Give Hotels a Lasting Edge, Study of Indian Five-Star Staff Finds

Hotels around the world are under mounting pressure to cut their environmental footprint, from energy-hungry lobbies to mountains of single-use plastics. But a new study suggests that the most powerful sustainability tool at a hotel’s disposal may not be a solar panel or a smart thermostat — it may be the human resources department. Research published in SN Social Sciences by Vikash Mandal, Supriya Singh, and Aalap Patel of Karnavati University in India finds that green human resource management practices can translate directly into a sustainable competitive advantage for hospitality firms, provided the workforce is equipped with the right environmental knowledge and led by managers who genuinely include employees in green decision-making.

The study tackles a question that has long puzzled both researchers and executives: why do some sustainability initiatives deliver lasting strategic benefits while others fade into expensive public relations exercises? The authors draw on the resource-based view of the firm, a foundational theory in strategic management holding that a company’s competitive edge comes from resources that are valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and hard to substitute. Physical green technologies, they argue, can be purchased by any competitor. What cannot be so easily copied is a workforce whose collective environmental knowledge, skills, and habits have been deliberately cultivated over years — what the researchers call green human capital.

To test this idea, the team surveyed 321 employees working in five-star hotels in India, recruited through purposive sampling. Respondents rated their hotels’ green human resource management practices, their own environmental competencies, the green inclusive leadership behavior of their managers, and the extent to which their organization enjoyed a sustainable competitive advantage. Because the data were collected at a single point in time, the study is cross-sectional, meaning it captures associations rather than proving causation. The authors analyzed the proposed relationships using Smart-PLS 4.0, a widely used software package for partial least squares structural equation modeling, a statistical technique well suited to testing models that chain together multiple indirect pathways.

The results were striking. Green human resource management practices — which include green recruitment, green training, green performance appraisal, and green reward systems — had a significant positive effect on sustainable competitive advantage. In other words, hotels that systematically hired for environmental values, trained staff in eco-friendly procedures, evaluated employees partly on green criteria, and rewarded pro-environmental behavior were more likely to report advantages that competitors could not easily erode. This finding aligns with a growing body of international research linking environmental HR practices to outcomes ranging from reduced energy consumption to improved green innovation.

But the study’s most interesting contribution lies in what happens between the HR policy and the competitive outcome. The researchers found that green human capital — the aggregate environmental knowledge, skills, and abilities of the workforce — partially mediates the relationship. In plain terms, green HR practices do not magically produce competitive advantage on their own; they work by building a cadre of employees who understand sustainability deeply enough to apply it in their daily decisions, from housekeeping protocols to kitchen waste management. When those practices fail to develop such human capital, their strategic payoff diminishes. The partial nature of the mediation is also telling: some of the benefit flows directly from the practices themselves, perhaps through signaling effects or organizational culture, but a substantial portion travels through the people the practices shape.

The third element of the model adds a leadership dimension. Green inclusive leadership — a style in which managers invite participation, value diverse perspectives, and make employees feel psychologically safe to voice environmental concerns — was found to strengthen the indirect effect of green HR practices on competitive advantage. This means that the same green HR program can yield very different results depending on the leadership climate in which it operates. Where leaders are inclusive and visibly committed to sustainability, employees appear more willing to internalize green values and convert training into action. Where leadership is indifferent or top-down, even well-designed HR practices may underperform. The finding echoes earlier work by the same research group on green inclusive leadership and employee green behavior in the hotel industry, as well as studies linking inclusive leadership to psychological safety and creative involvement.

For hotel managers, the practical implications are concrete. First, sustainability cannot be delegated to an environmental officer or a certification audit; it must be woven into the entire employee lifecycle, from the job advertisement to the retirement party. Second, investment in green training is not a cost center but a strategic asset, because it builds the human capital that competitors cannot replicate. Third, leadership development matters as much as HR policy design. A hotel chain that trains its general managers to lead inclusively on environmental matters may extract more value from its green HR investments than one that simply issues sustainability mandates from headquarters. The authors suggest that aligning human resource practices with sustainability goals is a route to long-term competitive advantage rather than a compliance burden.

The findings also carry weight for the hospitality sector specifically, which is one of the most resource-intensive service industries in the world. Tourism accounts for a substantial share of global carbon emissions, and hotels consume large amounts of water, energy, and disposable materials. In India, where the five-star segment is expanding rapidly and international guests increasingly scrutinize environmental credentials, the competitive stakes are high. A hotel that builds genuine green human capital may find that its advantage shows up not only in cost savings but also in guest loyalty, employee retention, and resilience against tightening environmental regulation.

Of course, the study has limitations that readers should keep in mind. The cross-sectional design means the direction of causality cannot be definitively established — it is possible, for instance, that hotels with stronger competitive positions simply find it easier to invest in green HR. The sample is drawn from a single country and a single industry segment, which may limit generalizability to other contexts. Self-reported measures are also vulnerable to common method bias, a well-known challenge in organizational research, although the authors took steps to address this concern. Future research using longitudinal designs, multi-source data, or samples from other sectors and regions would strengthen the causal claims.

Nevertheless, the study adds an important piece to the puzzle of how organizations convert environmental ambition into durable business value. It suggests that the green transition is not merely a matter of installing efficient equipment or publishing sustainability reports. It is, at its core, a human capital problem: organizations succeed when they hire, train, evaluate, and reward people in ways that build environmental competence, and when leaders create the inclusive conditions under which that competence can flourish. For an industry built on service, hospitality, and human interaction, that message may prove to be the most sustainable advantage of all.

Subject of Research: Does green human resource management foster sustainable competitive advantage? An empirical examination of a moderated mediation model in the hospitality industry

Article Title: Does green human resource management foster sustainable competitive advantage? An empirical examination of a moderated mediation model in the hospitality industry

Article References: Mandal, V., Singh, S., & Patel, A. (2026). Does green human resource management foster sustainable competitive advantage? An empirical examination of a moderated mediation model in the hospitality industry. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 399. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01679-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01679-z

Keywords: green human resource management, sustainable competitive advantage, green human capital, green inclusive leadership, hospitality industry, five-star hotels, India, resource-based view, employee green behavior, sustainability, PLS-SEM, organizational behavior