1 Determinants of environmental management in the Red Sea Hotels: Personal and Organizational Values and Contextual Variables Dr Mohammed El Dief, Helwan University Dr Xavier Font, Leeds Metropolitan University Forthcoming at the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research Abstract What motivates firms to adopt environmental management practices is one of the most significant aspects in the contemporary academic debate in which the review of the existing literature yields, with an obvious contextual bias towards developed world, contested theories and inconclusive findings. Providing a unique model that brings together the individual and organizational levels of analysis on firms’ adoption of environmental management practices, this study aims to provide a new insight from the context of developing world. Data from 158 Red Sea hotels reveal two identifiable dimensions of environmental management- planning and organization, and operations- that can be explained as originating from different values. While organizational altruism is a powerful predictor of both two dimensions, managers’ personal values and organizational competitive orientation are only relevant to environmental operations. The evidence also indicates that contextual variables such as chain affiliation, hotel star rating and size are important to explain hotels’ environmental management behaviors. What makes some hotels more environmentally proactive than others? We explain this through a conceptual model test with Red Sea hotels. The study first outlines a range of environmental management practices (EMPs), broken down into organizational and operational, which the literature has reported widely since the early 1990s, as a way of introducing the challenge facing many academics and donors of how to explain the reasons why some firms choose to adopt them, while many others do not. It then introduces three theories to explain the behavior of firms towards environmental engagement, going beyond the coarse early assumptions that cost cuttings would be the single measure to provide a business case that firms would respond to.