How Internal Relationship Marketing Drives the Well-Being–Performance Nexus: Insights from Saudi Arabia's Hotel Workforce

Abstract: Over the past decade, sustainable tourism has emerged as a strategic issue for hotel organisations amid growing environmental, social, and economic pressures. In this context, hotels are seeking to integrate sustainability practices not only into resource management, but also into their organisational and relational models. Among the internal levers that can be mobilised, internal relationship marketing is emerging as a key determinant of sustainable performance, as it aims to develop employee engagement, satisfaction, and active participation in organisational initiatives (Ahmed et al., 2021; Kim & Lee, 2022). Thus, the question of whether internal relationship marketing can be considered an essential element of sustainable tourism is of major scientific interest, as it allows us to explore a dimension that has received little attention in the literature, at the intersection of human resource management, hotel marketing, and sustainability. By introducing three essential relational variables—job satisfaction, organizational trust, and organizational commitment—this article aims to better understand the role of the internal relational approach between employees' well-being at work and their performance in terms of productivity and innovative behavior. To carry out this work, we used a quantitative study based on a database of 258 employees of several hotels in Saudi Arabia. The results show that well-being at work is an input variable to the internal relational model. Two central and mediating relational variables are job satisfaction and organizational trust. Finally, the internal relational chain has three outputs: the employee's commitment to the organization, their willingness to try new things, and their productivity. These results confirm and recommend the importance of good management through an internal relational approach within a company.