Pushing the Frontier of Sustainable Service Operations : Evidence from the U.S. Hospitality Industry

This research examines how the environmental sustainability decisions of service supply chain constituents – owners, operators and customers – impact the operating performance frontier (Schmenner and Swink 1998). We develop outcome-based environmental sustainability measures and propose a frontier framework for assessing sustainable service operations management (SSOM) using these measures. The framework is tested using a panel dataset featuring 984 U.S. hotel properties from 2001 to 2006. The findings map an improvement path via leveraging the entire service chain: engaging customers in sustainable development and improving operations to drive down resource consumption; expanding access to environmentally conscious customers; and investing in sustainable service differentiation