Culture or control? Asymmetric pathways to sustainability assurance in the luxury hospitality industry

Sustainability is no longer peripheral to hotel operations; it is increasingly bound to service quality, operational credibility and competitive positioning. Yet how sustainability commitments are converted into reliable and auditable daily practice remains insufficiently understood, particularly in luxury hospitality. Addressing this gap, this study adopts a configurational perspective grounded in complexity theory to examine how psychological and organizational conditions combine to produce high sustainability assurance. Data were collected from 25 managerial informants in Thai five-star hotels and analyzed using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). The results show that Attitude is a necessary but insufficient condition for high sustainability assurance, meaning that positive environmental orientation must be reinforced by wider social or organizational mechanisms to become operationally dependable. Three configurational pathways emerged: an Institutional Pathway combining Attitude, GHRM Incentives and QA Integration; a Cultural Pathway combining Attitude, Subjective Norms and QA Integration; and an Integrated Pathway combining all four conditions. Across all successful configurations, QA Integration appeared as a recurring structural anchor. Analysis of the negated outcome further confirmed causal asymmetry, showing that low Sustainability Assurance arises through distinct breakdown configurations rather than as the simple inverse of success. The study advances hospitality sustainability research by reframing sustainability assurance as a configured quality-management outcome and provides a practical basis for designing context-sensitive pathways to auditable green service delivery.