This paper aims to explore the impact of a hotel’s reward system on strengthening: positiverelationships and communication among employees; the creation of a change-friendlyorganisational climate and cultural change barriers, within the context of a cultural changeprocess in a hotel. Quantitative data were collected from a proportionally stratified,representative sample of 207 Greek five-star hotels’ senior executives and analysed with theprincipal component method of extraction and Structural Equation Modelling. This led to thecreation and validation of three prototype second-order latent variable models, whichhighlight and depict the impact of individual variables and their importance for a rewardsystem creating an organisational climate for or against cultural change in hotels. Theoriginality of the paper lays on both theoretical and practical levels. On a theoretical level, thepaper’s findings manage to fill a knowledge gap through a novel modelling of a rewardsystem on a hotel’s organisational climate in times of cultural change. On a practical level, thepaper findings enable hotels’ executives to focus on specific variables of a reward system thatcan enhance and/or prevent a cultural change initiative.