Sustainable Organizational Management in the Hospitality Industry: Green Climate, Leadership, Employee Engagement and Well-Being

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the Special Issue entitled "Sustainable Organizational Management in the Hospitality Industry: Green Climate, Leadership, Employee Engagement and Well-Being".

1. Focus, Scope, and Purpose

The aim of this Special Issue is to explore sustainable organizational management in the hospitality industry through the interconnected lenses of green climate, leadership, employee engagement, and well-being. As hospitality organizations face mounting pressure from environmental, social, and ethical imperatives, the pursuit of sustainability has expanded beyond eco-friendly operations to encompass human-centered and organizational dimensions of sustainability.

This Issue focuses on understanding how organizational green climate—shared perceptions of pro-environmental values and practices—interacts with leadership styles that promote sustainability and ethical responsibility. We seek to illuminate how these factors influence employees’ psychological well-being, engagement, creativity, and pro-environmental behavior, ultimately contributing to the long-term resilience and performance of hospitality organizations.

The scope of this Issue embraces interdisciplinary research that integrates perspectives from hospitality and tourism management, organizational behavior, sustainability studies, and human resource management. Both quantitative and qualitative studies, as well as conceptual, empirical, and review papers, are welcome.

The overarching purpose is to provide an academic and practical platform for examining how sustainable leadership and climate can foster both organizational effectiveness and employee flourishing, aligning environmental stewardship with human sustainability in the hospitality context.

2. Relationship to Existing Research

While existing hospitality research has examined green hotels, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and environmental management systems, there is a growing need to bridge these operational perspectives with organizational psychology and human sustainability research. This Special Issue will therefore extend the conversation by undertaking the following:

• Integrating green organizational climate theory (e.g., Norton et al., 2014) with emerging frameworks on sustainable leadership and employee well-being.
• Examining psychological mechanisms (e.g., meaningful work, green identity, emotional energy, AI-driven sustainability practices) that explain how leadership and climate influence employee outcomes.
• Highlighting cross-cultural and sectoral comparisons that reveal how contextual factors shape the relationship between sustainability and employee engagement across different hospitality settings.
• Contributing to transformational pathways for the hospitality sector in achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and SDG 13 (Climate Action).

By emphasizing the human side of sustainability, this Issue will supplement existing research that has largely focused on environmental or economic dimensions, thus encouraging a more holistic model of sustainable hospitality management.

Prof. Dr. Hye Hyun Yoon
Dr. Hyo Sun Jung
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainable hospitality management
• organizational green climate
• sustainable leadership
• employee engagement
• well-being
• corporate social responsibility
• pro-environmental behavior
• resilience
• human sustainability
• hospitality innovation