Employee innovative behavior

What is it about?

Although service innovations have been recognized to be important for the long-term strategic success of hospitality firms, to date, the elicitation of innovative behavior has received little attention in the extant hospitality research literature.Consistent with extant human resource management (HRM) studies that have advocated the agent-centered perspective, this study’s results illuminate a causal chain through which employee self-reported (Time 1, Source 1) perceived high-investment human resource practices (HIHRP) augments individual frontline, customer-contact, hotel employee supervisor-rated (Time 2, Source 2) innovative behavior. This study illuminates individual hotel employee self-reported perceived HIHRP as a key proximal determinant and individual hotel employee supervisor-rated innovative behavior as a key proximal consequence of two positive organizationally relevant individual-level psychological outcomes: that is, frontline, customer-contact, hotel employee self-reported readiness for change and absorptive capacity.

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Why is it important?

The current empirical inquiry rejoins Hon and Lui’s (2016) call for research to investigate whether employee readiness for change mediates the relationship between its precursors (e.g., employee-perceived HIHRP) and consequences (e.g., employee innovative behavior). Moreover, this empirical inquiry is one of the first to study absorptive capacity at the individual level of analysis and investigate employee-perceived HIHRP as a proximal determinant and employee innovative behavior as a proximal consequence of individual, frontline, customer-contact, hotel employee absorptive capacity.

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