Environmental performance in the hotel sector: the case of the Western Canary Islands

The appropriate management of environmental factors in the business world is a question of considerable interest to the scientific world, since studies increasingly reveal that such management has important competitive implications for the firm. One of the questions on which there does not yet exist sufficient consensus in the literature is how to evaluate the environmental behavior of companies, as a prior step of being able to establish the implications of such behavior for other aspects of management such as efficiency, productivity or, in the final analysis, the economic performance of the organization. eed to have an available valid and reliable measurement instruments is especially important in the case of the services sector, much less analyzed than the industrial sector. In the latter it is much more feasible to obtain objective indicators of company environmental performance. ndamental objective of the present study is consequently to develop and validate a measurement instrument to evaluate environmental performance in the hotel sector. This sector, while under analyzed, has productive processes which generate an evident environmental impact. udy begins with an extensive review of the literature on company environmental performance, to delimit the scope of this concept. On the basis of this review, the authors develop a measurement instrument capable of confirming the validity of that construct. The Rasch model is applied in the empirical analysis, to a sample of 187 hotel establishments in one of the most internationally important tourist destinations, the Western Canary Islands (Spain). The results confirm the content validity of the environmental performance construct. Other important results identify the frequency of achievement of excellence in the distinct aspects of environmental performance for hotel firms and suggest the need to expand the delimitation of the construct.