Fostering green innovative behavior among hotel employees: The interplay of green human resource management practices and transformational leadership in Hanoi

In the context of the hospitality industry’s mounting pressure to adopt sustainable development paradigms, green management is increasingly recognized as a strategic resource. This study aims to explore the underlying mechanisms through which green human resource management and corporate environmental responsibility influence employees’ green innovative behavior in 3–5 star hotels in Hanoi. Employing a qualitative-dominant sequential explanatory design, the research triangulates deep insights from semi-structured in-depth interviews (n=5) with descriptive quantitative data derived from a staff survey (n=409). The robust quantitative survey serves exclusively as a macro-level descriptive baseline, paving the way for deep qualitative insights that drive the core explanatory findings. The statistical baseline analysis reveals that Green Transformational Leadership (GTL) is perceived most positively by employees (highest mean score of 3.89), whereas CER practices exhibit the lowest evaluation (3.52), indicating a gap between organizational orientation and daily execution. Qualitative insights further unpack these statistical realities, demonstrating that while employees possess a clear awareness of green training and policies, the emergence of proactive environmental initiatives is heavily contingent upon leadership support. The findings highlight that green organizational culture and green organizational commitment act as pivotal mediating factors. Furthermore, GTL plays a fundamental role in facilitating the translation of human resource practices into an eco-friendly organizational culture. Ultimately, this synergy fosters employee green initiatives, which predominantly manifest as experience-based, incremental improvements in daily operations. Theoretically, this study uniquely synthesizes the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity framework with the cultural dimension of high power distance, enriching the existing literature by providing robust, localized empirical evidence on the interplay of sustainable HR practices and leadership. Practically, it suggests that hospitality enterprises must strategically integrate ecological objectives into their management systems while empowering leaders to cultivate a green work environment to mobilize pragmatic, bottom-up environmental innovations.