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EXPLORING THE ROLE OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY: THREE ESSAYS ABOUT PERFORMANCE, RESILIENCE, AND COMMUNICATION
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2025-08
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Tourism and Sport
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https://doi.org/10.34944/kynb-jm49
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the strategic dimensions of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) within the hospitality industry, examining its role in enhancing organizational performance, building resilience, and influencing stakeholder perceptions in increasingly digitized business environments. As hospitality organizations face heightened stakeholder scrutiny, reputational vulnerabilities, and intensified competitive dynamics, CSR has transcended its traditional boundaries of ethical compliance to emerge as a fundamental mechanism for creating sustainable value. However, the effectiveness of CSR initiatives demonstrates considerable heterogeneity across industrial contexts, crisis scenarios, and communication modalities. This dissertation employs a multifaceted empirical framework that encompasses meta-analytic synthesis, event study methodologies, and cross-platform comparison, while integrating theoretical foundations from stakeholder theory, the resource-based view, attribution theory, and signaling theory. The findings reveal that CSR initiatives generate positive performance outcomes, particularly when conceptualized as long-term strategic investments and executed with temporal consistency and programmatic comprehensiveness. Internal stakeholders, notably employees, emerge as critical mediators in the CSR–business performance relationship, highlighting the strategic importance of intangible assets, including trust, engagement, and organizational identity.
CSR also demonstrates significant reputational buffering capacity during organizational crises. Firms with sustained, high-intensity CSR engagement exhibit attenuated negative market responses following data security breaches. Nevertheless, this protective mechanism operates within defined parameters: when stakeholder expectations cultivated through CSR commitments are violated, particularly in instances of severe, internally attributed, or recurrent incidents, stakeholder reactions may intensify beyond baseline responses observed in CSR-absent contexts. This phenomenon highlights the paradoxical nature of CSR, which is both protective and potentially amplifies a strategic asset.
Furthermore, the dissertation demonstrates that the effectiveness of CSR communication, specifically through environmental certification displays, depends not merely on signal content but also critically on signal presentation, timing, and contextual positioning. Environmental certifications serve as effective differentiation mechanisms within comparative evaluation contexts, such as digital platform environments. However, excessive prominence or intrusive presentation can generate inflated consumer expectations, resulting in diminished satisfaction when performance fails to meet elevated standards.
Collectively, these findings contribute to a sophisticated understanding of CSR as a context-dependent, multidimensional strategic resource. The research offers actionable insights for hospitality industry practitioners, digital platform architects, and policy stakeholders seeking to optimize CSR implementation within the context of contemporary stakeholder expectations, market dynamics, and technological infrastructures.
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