Recovering in the post-pandemic era: the role of employee voice, knowledge sharing, employee innovation, and service recovery performance in the hotel industry

Purpose: Covid-19 pandemic is perceived as one of the great disasters in history. It forced countries to impose travel restrictions and lockdowns, and it negatively influenced hotels' performance. Therefore, this article aims to provide explanations of how hotels can survive, recover and succeed in the post-pandemic period. This article focuses on the role of employee voice, knowledge sharing, and employee innovation in promoting service recovery performance. Design/methodology/approach: This is a conceptual paper that focuses on discussing the relationships between employee voice, knowledge sharing, employee innovation, and service recovery performance. Findings: The study suggests that employee voice is a vital element that can enhance knowledge sharing at hotels. Furthermore, knowledge sharing is proposed to encourage employees to engage in innovative behavior, which, in turn, can promote service recovery performance. Originality/value: The study provides a framework that explains a mechanism of how hotels can accelerate recovery efforts from Covid-19 repercussions by shedding light on the important role of employee voice, knowledge sharing, and employee innovation. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Research on stimulating mechanism and restricting factors of employees’ innovative behaviour under COVID-19

Innovation is the foundation of an enterprise’s survival and development. Employee innovation is the source of enterprise innovation. Under the COVID-19 epidemic, staff innovation is crucial to whether an enterprise can transform a crisis into an opportunity. However, the negative emotions caused by the epidemic will hinder staff innovation. The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic in China was investigated from May 2020 to October 2021 by using questionnaires. This study explores the motivating mechanism and restricting factors of employees’ innovative behaviour under sudden public crisis events. The software SPSS 22.0 is used for the descriptive statistical and correlation analyses of the collected data. Enterprise managers need to study the influencing factors of employees’ innovative behaviour under the COVID-19 epidemic to solve the problem of employees’ negative emotions. Based on the statistical analysis of 639 valid questionnaires for employees of high-tech enterprises, this study explores the motivating mechanism and influencing factors of employees’ innovative behaviour from the aspects of positive psychological quality and leaders’ interpersonal emotion management. This study also uses work autonomy as a mediating variable to verify its mediating role in the process of employees’ positive psychological quality and leaders’ interpersonal emotion management on innovation behaviour. This study tested the moderating effect of employees’ perceived corporate social responsibility on the relationship between employees’ positive psychological quality, leaders’ interpersonal emotion management and innovative behaviour. Through the statistical analysis of 639 valid questionnaires of employees in high-tech enterprises, the relevant model assumptions are verified. Therefore, under the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises should take responsibility from the aspect of caring for employees to promote the positive effect of employees’ psychological attitudes on work results. This study provides countermeasures to ensure the smooth progress of employee innovation activities. Copyright © 2022 Wu.

Supporting participatory innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic: a comparative study of enterprise social media use

Purpose The need for accelerating innovation is exacerbated as organizations struggle to either adapt or perish in this unforgiving condition due to the COVID-19 disruption. To address this issue, many organizations have embraced employee-driven participatory innovation to survive and thrive albeit the uncertainties. This study aims to investigate the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in supporting and facilitating these efforts. Design/methodology/approach This study first identified the underlying mechanisms that allow ESM use to foster and maintain participatory innovation and then reexamined how these mechanisms played out during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. The data was collected through a questionnaire in two phases, before and during work-from-home mandates, and the results were analyzed and compared to capture similarities and differences. Findings The results revealed that innovation culture and management support mediated the effects of ESM use on three measures of innovation productivity in both conditions. Interestingly, the effect of ESM use was more prominent in driving innovation in the work-from-home condition. This effect was not limited to the direct effect of ESM use on innovation productivity but on innovation culture and management support as well. Originality/value The results suggest that ESM offer a potentially useful path to support and enable employees to participate in the innovation processes, especially when they work remotely or in a distributed team. More generally, this paper should be of interest to researchers and practitioners interested in understanding, implementing and evaluating enterprise social software applications and encouraging employee-driven participatory innovation.