Emissions Performance as a Capability‐Based Organizational Outcome: Evidence From Interpretable Machine Learning in Hospitality and Tourism

ABSTRACT Reducing corporate greenhouse gas emissions has become a central strategic challenge for firms, yet substantial heterogeneity persists in emissions performance even among organizations facing similar regulatory and market conditions. Existing research has largely attributed emissions outcomes to governance mechanisms, ESG initiatives, or financial capacity, often assuming linear and additive effects. This study advances a capability‐based perspective by conceptualizing firm‐level emissions performance not as a capability in itself, but as an emergent organizational outcome reflecting how effectively firms deploy and coordinate capability‐related workforce, operational, and managerial systems. Using firm‐level ESG and financial data from 110 publicly listed hospitality and tourism firms over the period 2015–2024, we apply ensemble machine learning techniques, bagging, random forest, and boosting, to model emissions performance. Boosting models consistently outperform alternative approaches and are analyzed using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and partial dependence plots (PDP) to ensure interpretability and theory development. Across four progressively enriched model specifications, the results show that workforce quality, resource‐use efficiency, and managerial effectiveness, the empirical proxies for underlying organizational capabilities, are the most influential and stable predictors of emissions performance. Governance mechanisms and financial performance display patterns consistent with conditioning rather than substitutive roles, being associated with the effectiveness of capability‐related systems without independently determining emissions outcomes. The analysis identifies nonlinear relationships, asymmetric predictive patterns associated with weak capability‐related organizational indicators, and joint partial‐dependence patterns consistent with complementarity among organizational systems, suggesting that emissions‐related performance may be sensitive to organizational deficiencies and the alignment of related practices. By focusing on the hospitality and tourism industry, where emissions are embedded in continuous service operations, the study highlights the central role of organizational execution in shaping environmental outcomes. The findings contribute to sustainability and strategic management research by explaining emissions performance as an observable outcome of capability deployment, coordination, and complementarity rather than as the direct product of isolated ESG policies, governance structures, or financial resources.