Citation: Salama, W.; Nor El Deen, M.; Albakhit, A.; Zaki, K. Understanding the Connection between Sustainable Human Resource Management and the Hotel Business Outcomes: Evidence from the Green-Certified Hotels of Egypt. Sustainability 2022, 14, 5647. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su14095647 Academic Editors: Huseyin Arasli, Trude Furunes and Hasan Evrim Arici Received: 10 April 2022 Accepted: 5 May 2022 Published: 7 May 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). sustainability Article Understanding the Connection between Sustainable Human Resource Management and the Hotel Business Outcomes: Evidence from the Green-Certified Hotels of Egypt Wagih Salama 1,2, * , Mohamed Nor El Deen 1 , Azzam Albakhit 1 and Karam Zaki 3,4, * 1 Department of Social Studies, College of Arts, King Faisal University, P.O. Box 380, Al Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia; mnoreldeen@kfu.edu.sa (M.N.E.D.); aalbakhit@kfu.edu.sa (A.A.) 2 Department of Hotel Studies, High Institute of Tourism and Hotels, Ismailia 41511, Egypt 3 Hotel Studies Department, Faculty of Tourism and Hotels, Fayoum University, Fayoum 63514, Egypt 4 Department of Business Administration, College of Science and Humanities, Shaqra University, Shaqra 11911, Saudi Arabia * Correspondence: welsayed@kfu.edu.sa (W.S.); kgm00@fayoum.edu.eg (K.Z.) Abstract: Sustainable human resource management (SHRM) practices are extensively believed to cause a strategic advantage for the hotel industry. However, while a growing body of evidence indicates that SHRM practices are related to superior organization-level outcomes, it is rather unclear as to how these practices could affect such outcomes and whether they result in desirable hotel outcomes. This paper aimed to examine the moderation effect of hotels’ environmental strategy (ES) on the relationship between SHRM practices and hotel business outcomes: operational performance (OP), competitive advantage (C), and corporate performance (CP). Following a positivism philosophy, a proposed hypothesised model was validated through a survey strategy. Data were obtained from 247 green-certified hotel managers based in Egypt’s top-two major cities involving green-certified hotels. Structural equation modelling was used to test the model relationships. The findings lent credence to the significant connectedness between SHRM practices and hotel business outcomes. The moderation effect of ES was positively confirmed by 83.4% of the SHRM practices, demonstrating that ES is a crucial driver of hotel business outcomes through the optimal usage of SHRM. Negatively, it was revealed that only sustainable promotion practice (16.6%) does not moderate its impact on the hotel business outcomes. This research is the first empirical study to examine the moderation effect of ES on the nexus between the SHRM and hotel business outcomes in the green-certified hotels of Egypt. Keywords: sustainable human resource management; environmental strategy; green-certified hotel; hotel’s image 1. Introduction The trend toward sustainable practices in the hotel industry has become imperative, attracting scholars’ attention during the COVID-19 era. Today, the industrial and service world in general, and the field of hotel business in particular, is witnessing a growing inter- est in environmental issues and a rapid shift towards cultural awareness in the sustainable environment in light of the ever-increasing cognitive and behavioural awareness of the dangers of negative consequences caused by the problems and difficulties of industrial and production pollution, industrial waste, and the tremendous waste of natural resources [1,2]. Significant attention has been paid by governments and non-governmental organizations worldwide, warning of the grave risks to humanity resulting from environmental pollution and its impact on most aspects of life, and establishing the endeavour to raise the necessary awareness regarding the environment. There are many calls for businesses to be more sustainable than they have been traditionally [3] by transforming their usage of resources Sustainability 2022, 14, 5647. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14095647 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability