Is “greenhushing” indeed desired by hot...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication is generally regarded as good and necessary to inform stakeholders of a company’s CSR deeds. However, research has recently uncovered the practice of “greenhushing” within the context of the hospitality industry (Coles, Warren, Borden, & Dinan, 2017; Font, Elgammal, & Lamond, 2017). Greenhushing means that companies de-emphasize green credentials and CSR activities. Going on holidays is an indulgent act that might result from people feeling they have earned some luxury, including behaving lavishly in terms of resource consumption and responsible behavior. Thus, curtailing this indulgent, irresponsible guest behavior without compromising a guest’s holiday experience is a key challenge for hotels. This paper explores whether the assumption that customers do not want to hear about CSR communication while on holiday is true from the customers’ side and what type of communication achieves to curtail unethical behavioral intentions. Based on 594 usable responses from an online survey, we undertake a moderation analysis with a multi-categorical antecedent variable (different communication stimuli), pro-environmental identity as a moderator and behavioral intentions for “unethical” behavior as a dependent variable using PROCESS 3.0 for SPSS (Hayes, 2018). The results provide partial support for our theoretical predictions.