Purpose The Purpose of this mixed-methods study is to investigate the relationship between leadership styles and employees’ green behavior within the context of Egyptian five-star hotels. Specifically, it examines the mechanisms through which entrepreneurial and resilient leadership influence an innovation climate and employees’ intellectual agility to foster sustainable outcomes. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a sequential mixed-methods design. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the hypothesized relationships using survey data from 349 hotel employees. This is supplemented by the qualitative phase, which involves semi-structured online interviews with 25 hotel professionals to get more insight into leadership practices that have contributed to sustainability. The theoretical foundations of this investigation include social cognitive theory and dynamic capabilities theory. Findings Resilient and entrepreneurial leadership can enhance employees’ intellectual agility by fostering an innovation-oriented climate, which, in turn, strengthens their green organizational citizenship behavior and green innovative behavior. In the presence of green knowledge sharing, the climate of innovation has a greater impact on intellectual agility; perceived organizational support (POS) also enhances the impact of intellectual agility on each of the two green behaviors. The qualitative results show that leaders promoting an innovation-oriented culture enhance agility and knowledge transfer. Employees consequently invest more in environmental initiatives, bringing tangible benefits to the hotel, including cost savings and positive recognition from guests. Practical implications The findings indicate that an integrated managerial approach is needed: developing resilient and entrepreneurial leadership, establishing an innovation-supportive climate, using human resources (HR) practices to improve employees’ intellectual agility and creating formal mechanisms for green knowledge sharing. Providing tangible organizational assistance could also enable employees to harness their abilities and expertise into enduring green conduct and innovation. Originality/value This study contributes to the hospitality sustainability literature by integrating entrepreneurial and resilient leadership perspectives. The research establishes a sequential mediation chain in which innovation climate and intellectual agility transmit the effects of leadership to employees’ green behaviors, while demonstrating how green knowledge sharing and POS act as boundary conditions. The dual-theory framework, together with mixed-methods research in an emerging market setting, provides fresh theoretical and practical insights for promoting employee-led green innovation.
This study aims to examine the wine lists’ influence on restaurant customers’ ordering decisions and the role of wine ordering in shaping the overall dining experience. Based on 27 in-depth interviews with restaurant patrons who ordered wine from a wine list, this study employed a grounded theory methodology (GTM) to analyze data. The findings reveal three core categories influencing wine ordering experiences: wine list architecture, wine ordering process and wine-centric experiences. Within the wine list category, wine attributes, menu designscape and cognitive navigability emerged as key subcategories shaping wine list architecture. The wine ordering process is shaped by wine-specific factors, restaurant-related factors, personal factors and food-wine pairing. Notably, a wine-centric experience, characterized by wine fascination, culinary enhancement and relational enjoyment, significantly impacts the overall dining experience. These findings inform restaurant managers about the complex wine-ordering process. To optimize diners’ decision experience, managers should prioritize key wine attributes, such as grape variety, price, type, serving size, region, taste profiles and the wine list’s design. This study provides an exploratory conceptualization of the wine list as a decision-making interface that shapes consumers’ wine-ordering decisions in restaurant settings, offering conceptual insights with implications for research and practice.
This study aims to examine how employee wellness programs (EWPs) function in high-demand service environments, addressing the limitation that prior research assumes wellness resources automatically improve employee well-being. A four-stage mixed-methods design was adopted, including literature review, expert content validation, Fuzzy Delphi analysis with 28 experts and a survey of 507 hotel employees analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. A six-dimensional EWP framework comprising 26 validated indicators was confirmed. The results show that EWP dimensions are not functionally equivalent but operate within a structured system. Organizational resources, particularly healthcare support and health management policies, play a foundational role, while other dimensions contribute to recovery and longer-term development. The findings suggest that the effectiveness of wellness initiatives depends on employees’ capacity to use available resources. By integrating conservation of resources theory with the well-being-as-capability perspective, this study reframes EWPs as a capability-enabling system that emphasizes resource usability rather than mere provision. Practically, hotels should prioritize foundational organizational resources before expanding other wellness initiatives, using the proposed three-stage implementation roadmap to guide strategic investment and promote sustainable employee well-being. This study provides a mechanism-based explanation of how wellness resources function in practice, offering a more nuanced framework for understanding employee well-being in the hospitality industry.
Grounded in Deutsch’s theory of cooperation and competition, this study aims to explain the paradoxical effect of psychological sense of community at work (PSCW) on knowledge hiding (KH) in frontline hospitality. It tests knowledge-based psychological ownership (KBPO) as the explanatory mechanism and prosocial motivation (PSM) as a motivational contingency. Time-lagged data were gathered in three waves from frontline hospitality employees in Pakistan, yielding 632 usable responses. The hypothesized moderated mediation model was tested using covariance-based structural equation modeling with bias-corrected bootstrapping. Contrary to the prevailing assumption that positive workplace social contexts suppress KH, PSCW was positively associated with KBPO and KBPO with KH, producing a significant indirect effect. PSM dampened the PSCW–KBPO link, weakening the indirect pathway among more prosocially motivated employees. The study extends KH theory by conceptualizing PSCW as an integrative antecedent, identifying KBPO as the mechanism explaining why KH persists within cohesive workplace communities and specifying PSM’s moderating role in this pathway, thereby questioning the view that positive workplace dynamics necessarily curbs KH. Hospitality managers should pair efforts to strengthen workplace community with practices that frame knowledge as a collective rather than a personal resource, such as cross-training, team-based rewards and promotion criteria that recognize knowledge contribution over exclusive expertise and should recruit and develop prosocially motivated employees. The study offers three contributions to KH research. It positions PSCW as a theoretically integrative antecedent, moving beyond the fragmented relational constructs of prior work; provides time-lagged evidence that strong workplace community can give rise to ownership-driven KH, revealing its dark side; and shows PSM to be the motivational contingency that determines when workplace community reduces protective hiding in frontline hospitality.
Purpose This paper aimed to examine the dual pathways through which service-robot (SR) anthropomorphism shapes consumer trust in service robots (CTSR), specifically the positive serial mediating effect of perceived warmth (WA) and perceived competence (CO) and the negative serial mediating effect of perceived identity threat (TH) and discomfort (DI). It further explored cross-cultural differences in consumer attitudes and their underlying reasons from the perspective of cultural tightness-looseness. Design/methodology/approach Five scenario experiments were conducted across three sets of SR picture stimuli, two service settings (hotel and hospital) and two cultures (China and the United States). Findings Both study 1 and study 2 found that anthropomorphism had a double-edged sword effect on CTSR across different sets of SR picture stimuli, service settings and cultures. An exploratory analysis in study 1 further revealed that among Chinese consumers, CTSR and its antecedents did not show significant differences across different service settings. Study 2 results further indicated that Chinese (versus. American) consumers had higher WA, CO and CTSR, along with lower TH and DI and that region-level cultural tightness influenced CTSR and its antecedents, potentially explaining these cross-cultural differences. Practical implications For hospitality managers, this paper offers insights on how to deploy anthropomorphic SRs across different cultural contexts. Originality/value This study developed a dialectical framework that integrates cognitive and affective serial mediation pathways and considers both the country- and region-level effects of cultural tightness on attitudes toward SRs.
