This paper focuses on how the external environment affects hotels’ performance in the city of Bukavu (DRCongo), and the roles of managerial practices in this relationship. Indeed, the hotel industry has experienced an unprecedented boom in recent decades in this country. Hotels have increased by 350%, from less than 500 in the 2000s to more than 5000 by the end of 2022. This growth implies that all hotels will be fighting for market shares as well as struggling to achieve performance, and survive in a competitive and turbulent environment. We have observed that several hotels have been unable to cope with the pressure of the external environment and go bankrupt after a very short period of operations. Only the ones that adapt their managerial practices survive and grow. This research therefore aims to demonstrate empirically that the performance of hotels in Bukavu does not depend solely on their external environment (economic, political, technological, legal), but more on the presence of certain internal factors (resources, structure, organizational culture, style of leadership, mode of exercise of power) which can influence it positively. These are, in fact, managerial practices that can have a medium and long-term influence on the competitiveness of firms and justify the good performance of hotels, despite the influence of external factors. After qualitative research, we use the Partial Least Squares Structural Equations Modelling (PLS-SEM) approach to assess the dimensionality of the external environment, managerial practices, and performance constructs and to test the relationships between them. Our results show that these practices positively moderate the relationship between the external environment and performance. Numerous managerial and theoretical implications are raised.
Keywords: Managerial practices, external environment, hotels, strategic behavior, performance, BUKAVU, DRC.
