Turning non-financial performance measurements into financial performance: The usefulness of front-office staff incentive systems in hotels

This paper investigates causal relationships between management control system (MCS) practices and performance in French Riviera hotels. The current literature presents mixed and contradictory findings regarding the relationships between delegation, performance measurements in incentive systems, and performance, both nonfinancial and financial. We argue that taking complexity into account when studying such relationships is hence of prime importance. In addition, our analytical method relies on the state of the art, relying on the tandem use of PLS-SEM and fsQCA. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, it is one of the first to extend a prior PLS-SEM analysis by a partial least-squares prediction-oriented segmentation (POS). Our findings highlight some very different pathways to hotel financial performance and the influence of the hotel customer orientation in this context. Those findings contribute to the literature on performance and the hospitality industry and highlights managerial implications related to the design of effective MCS practices.