How to inspire green creativity among Gen Z hotel employees: an investigation of the cross-level effect of green organizational climate

Green creativity (GC) serves as the cornerstone in driving green innovation. However, GC is the result of individual ideas, so motivating Gen Z employees, who are the primary employees to propose novel and practical environmental protection solutions, will in large part determine the future of hotel management. Drawing from social information processing theory and the componential model of creativity, this paper incorporates the variables of prosocial motivation, impression management motivation (IMM) and ecological reflexivity to develop a cross-level model of the impact of green organizational climate (GOC) on the GC of Gen Z employees. A total of 260 Gen Z employees from 37 four- and five-star hotels in China are empirically analyzed using HLM software. We demonstrate that GOC enhances the GC of Gen Z employees through prosocial motivation and IMM. We also find that prosocial motivation is more likely to stimulate Gen Z employees' GC under high ecological reflexivity, but that ecological reflexivity does not moderate the relationship between IMM and GC. Our study enriches the cross-level mechanism of the impact of GOC on GC from the perspectives of "green for others" and "green for myself". These results provide practical and cost-effective insights for sustainable hotel green development.