Abstract / Description
Destination Management and Marketing Organizations (DMMOs) shape the human resource and technological conditions under which tourism enterprises, including digital ventures, pursue resilience and growth, yet their structures are often designed as technical–administrative arrangements detached from the capacities of the destination community. This study investigates how participatory processes engaging local institutions, businesses and residents can inform the organizational and human resource design of contemporary DMMOs: their functional units, decision rights, participation routines and competency profile. Four Greek destinations of differing scale and type—Delphi, Meteora, Larisa and the Region of Epirus—each developing a DMMO under a nationally coordinated, recovery-funded programme, are examined through a qualitative, multiple-case design. Structural contingency and configurational fit serve as the primary lens; four mechanisms link participation to organizational form, with human resource capacity as a rate-limiting constraint. Expectations of a decision-making role vary with the custodial control exercised over core assets rather than with administrative scale. Endorsement of human resource development practices is near-invariant across contexts while expected resourcing scales with administrative level; the gap between the two is widest in small destinations. Technology priorities track perceived competency availability: ratings of AI-based tools are near-invariant across cases and do not rise with general technology enthusiasm, while training in data and digital skills is endorsed at uniformly high levels. Participatory organizational design is advanced as a theoretically grounded construct with stated scope conditions; its proposed consequences for configurational fit, legitimacy and entrepreneurial resilience are formulated as testable propositions rather than findings of this study.