Purpose: This paper aims to integrate leader–member exchange (LMX), creativity and performance research and to develop a model to investigate the relationships among LMX, task motivation, creativity and performance in the hospitality industry.Design/methodology/approach: Structural equation modeling (SEM) with bootstrap estimation was conducted with a sample of 312 leader–employee dyadic data from international tourist hotels in Taiwan.Findings: The results revealed that LMX positively affected performance and creativity. Most important of all, task motivation was found to mediate the relationship between LMX and creativity, while both task motivation and creativity were found to mediate the relationship between LMX and performance.Research limitations/implications: With efforts to combine research variables into a unified theoretical model, this study is the first in the field of hospitality research which explores the two-path mediating effects of these relationships in an integrated SEM framework. More specifically, this study provides a synthesized perspective with bootstrap analyses to broaden hotel research with regard to LMX and examine its influences on employees’ creativity and performance.Practical implications: The results of this study suggest that human resource departments in hotel companies should provide training programs for supervisors and employees to enhance their reciprocal relationships, and establish reward mechanisms to encourage the development of more creative services at work.Originality/value: This study added to the literature with its use of a non-Western sample, and extended the prior research in the context of the hospitality industry. Overall, the conclusions provide empirical evidence in an integrated model that task motivation can strengthen the influence of LMX on creativity and can also nourish the influence of creativity on employee performance.

The purpose of this study was to examine the key characteristics of sustainable service innovation in the hospitality industry. We conducted a content analysis based on the interview records for 17 experts (including three academic scholars, three government officers and 11 top-level managers) with an average of 20 years of experience in the hospitality management domain in Taiwan. The analytical results conform to Amabile’s (1988) componential theory of creativity and innovation and show that 11 characteristics are major indicators of sustainable service innovation in the hotel management field. These include the following characteristics: market position, customer satisfaction, service orientation, environmental thinking, employee involvement, incentive mechanism, human resource development, environmental services, cultural resource management, government policy and school education. Accordingly, using the integrated theory of sustainable service innovation and professional opinions from experts, we provide theoretical and practical implications for current and future trends on sustainability and innovation in the hospitality industry.

With the increasing competition in contemporary enterprise, sustainable human resource management is a powerful resource for workplace mental health. On the basis of job demands-recourses theory and conservation of resources theory, this study examined the relationship between empowering leadership and employees’ proactive work behavior. It also explored how job design inspires employees to be embedded in their work and to exhibit proactive work behavior. In addition, the research probed the mediating roles of job characteristics and job embeddedness in a serial mediation model within an integrated model. Data were collected from 461 employees of three- to five-star hotels through stratified random sampling. Results indicated that (1) empowering leadership has positive influences on job characteristics and proactive work behavior; (2) job characteristics have a positive influence on job embeddedness; (3) job embeddedness has a positive influence on proactive work behavior; (4) job characteristics mediate the effect of empowering leadership on proactive work behavior; (5) job embeddedness mediates the effect of empowering leadership on proactive work behavior; and (6) job characteristics and job embeddedness jointly mediate the effect of empowering leadership on proactive work behavior by bootstrapping analyses. Accordingly, this study suggests that promoting sustainable human resource management is needed for human health and organizational value at work, both of which enable empowering leadership to improve proactive work behavior via job characteristics and job embeddedness. The theoretical and managerial implications of empirical findings are also discussed.

Integrating leadership and creativity theories, this study proposed and examined a model linking transformational leadership, perceived organizational support, affective organizational commitment, creativity, and performance. Structural equation modeling was thus performed using 362 employee–supervisor dyads from the international tourist hotels in Taiwan. The results indicated that both transformational leadership and perceived organizational support were significantly and positively related to employee affective organizational commitment, creativity, and performance, while affective organizational commitment had significantly positive influences on creativity and performance. Support was also found for the significant and positive mediating relationships between affective organizational commitment and the influences of both transformational leadership and perceived organizational support on creativity and performance. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings for hospitality are also discussed.

This paper aims to investigate the mediating role of work engagement for the effects of deep acting, perceived organizational support, and self-efficacy on service quality under the conservation of resources (COR) theory and the job demands–resources (JD-R) model. Questionnaires were rigorously distributed by stratified random sampling. Data were collected from hospitality frontline employees (HFLEs) of hotels and restaurants in Taiwan during a period of two months. Structural equation modeling analyses were conducted to assess the data. Empirical results demonstrated work engagement is a significant mediator, enriching the antecedents and consequences of work engagement in hospitality literature. The findings suggest hospitality practitioners should consider a high-performance work system (HPWS) as an employee management tactic to implement sustainable human resource management (HRM). This practice can augment hospitality frontline employees’ willingness to stay in organizations in the long term and to maintain a satisfying service quality.