Service creativity efficiency of hotel businesses in Thailand: an empirical investigation of its antecedents and consequences.

• Author: Ooncharoen, Nantana

1. INTRODUCTION

   In the 21st century, innovation, sustained innovation has become a critical determinant of organizational success and survival (Mumford et al., 2007). Creativity is the generation of new ideas, and innovation and translation of these ideas into new products or services (Mumford and Gustafson, 1988). Creativity can occur by individuals and teams which are the fundamental of innovation, and the workplace environment is vital to encourage successful creativity that then obtains in profit-marketing innovation (Rice, 2003). From a global and historic perspective, creativity and innovation have been vital for human progress and profound global change (Wong and Pang, 2003). The theorized that the creation of new knowledge depends on a person's expertise, thinking skills, and motivation (Amabile, 1996). Therefore, creativity is one of essential elements that should not be neglected in a scientific, sound business framework. Especially, today's business environment is an important element to and organizational success is adaptability and the ability to manage the speed of change with in turn requires creativity and innovation (Carr and Johansson, 1995). Creativity and its support of innovation are essential for long-term corporate success. Namely, firms that deliver the same products and services in the same way will not last long, especially in the growing global economy, which continually emphasizes creativity (Gautschi, 2001). Innovation is related to the intentional and applied adoption of new concept and is focused on the practical application of ideas (Forrester, 2000). Thus, innovation gives entrepreneur of business insights into introducing innovation within their organizations and accelerating the development of creative performance in their staff. Therefore, an organization needs to clearly understand creativity through innovation and makes that concept into practice. The successful business has been found upon an innovative idea which create a new product, process or service that better fulfills the needs of customers. Especially, service organization (hotel) needs to understand how their firms can achieve a competence competitive advantage and obtain superior service performance over their competitor by adapting themselves to the industry environmental dynamism, understanding the changing needs of customers and responding to new market entries.

   Hotel business is greatly important to the country's economic development because it is a business that can partly help create international economy and trade to be stronger. Particularly, Thai government now has systematically developed tourism and has thoroughly developed and improved different tourist attractions in the country to be attractive and to attract domestic and foreign tourist to travel to different places throughout the country. This causes Thai hotel business to develop new service form as well as to increase service creativity efficiency of business to attract tourists and customers by emphasizing the importance and responding to customers' needs in order for them to have more satisfaction and more positive attitudes toward the services of hotel business. Service creativity efficiency is regarded as a strategy that will lead business to success and to receive worthwhile outcomes. Thai hotel business then should give the importance to service creativity efficiency in order to be an instrument for attracting customers to be more interested in the hotels' own products and services together with development of the business service quality and new services form to be able to overcome the competitors. In addition, creativity research is conducted firmly in the field of Psychology and the Arts (Sternberg and Lubart, 1999). Therefore, the essential of studying creativity and its relationships with other factors receive attention from many scholars. Moreover, previous study found that there is a lack of research into creativity in the hospitality industries. Namely, creativity is usually associated with artistic industries such as film making, drama, painting, music composing, fiction writing, poetry, etc. To bridge these gaps, this study, unlike previous research proposed the new perspective entitled "Service Creativity Efficiency of Hotel Business in Thailand: An Empirical Investigation of its Antecedents and Consequences"

   The objectives of this paper are as follows: 1) To examine the relationships between service creativity efficiency and competent competitive advantage, 2) To investigate the association between service creativity efficiency and service performance, 3) To test the linkage between competent competitive advantage and service performance, 4) To examine the relationships between competitive perception for differential service, prior knowledge and experience, knowledge sharing, alertness to opportunities and service creativity efficiency, 5) To determine the influence of moderating effects including: 5.1) Team culture that moderates effect on the relationships between antecedents of service creativity efficiency (competitive perception for differential service, prior knowledge and experience, knowledge sharing, alertness to opportunities) and service creativity efficiency; 5.2) Organizational support for new idea generation that is a moderator affecting on the relationships between antecedents of service creativity efficiency (competitive perception for differential service, prior knowledge and experience, knowledge sharing, and alertness to opportunities) and service creativity efficiency; 5.3) Environmental dynamism moderates the effect on the relationships between service creativity efficiency and competent competitive advantage; 5.4) Environmental dynamism moderates the influence on competent competitive advantage--service performance relationships.

   The main research question in this paper is how service creativity efficiency affects competent competitive advantage and service performance. Also, the specific research questions are as follows: 1) how does competent competitive advantage affect service performance?; 2) how do competitive perception for differential service, prior knowledge and experience, knowledge sharing, alertness to opportunities relate to service creativity efficiency?; 3) how does team culture moderate the relationships between corporate perception for differential service, prior knowledge and experience, knowledge sharing, alertness to opportunity and service creativity efficiency?; 4) how does organizational support for new idea generation moderate the relationships between corporate perception for differential service, prior knowledge and experience, knowledge sharing, alertness to opportunity and service creativity efficiency?; 5) how does environmental dynamism moderate the relationships between service creativity efficiency and competent competitive advantage?; 6) how does environmental dynamism moderate the relationships between competent competitive advantage and service performance? Also, that is to say the service creativity efficiency has been considered a prerequisite for service firms which can be analyzed what effort is successful for important competent competitive advantage and service performance. Therefore, this research attaches importance study about service creativity efficiency in hotel business because there is a lack of research studying in hotel business context which, most of researches have increasingly dealt with manufacturing which focuses on innovation (Sunbo and Gallouj, 2000; Mattson et al., 2005). In addition, there is a lack of research in the field of service creativity efficiency. The vital of developing service creativity efficiency and while entrepreneurial creativity are a desire behavior in most firms for present time, it is difficult to understand both how this complex phenomenon occurs and how to increase its rate of occurrence (Ko and Butler, 2007). Hence, understanding and increasing managerial service creativity are essential not only in developing economics, but also in developing economics, where the research discussed herein was conducted.

   This study is organizes as follows. First, it reviews of previous research in the area of service creativity efficiency and its antecedents and consequences literature, the links between the concept of service creativity efficiency to all of variables, and develops the key research hypotheses of those relationships. Second, it describes the details of research methods, including data collection, measurement, and statistics. Third, it gives the analysis results of the current study and corresponding discussion with some of reasons and explanations. Finally, it summarizes the findings of the study, point out both theoretical and managerial contributions, suggestions for further research and the limitations of the study.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESISES DEVELOPMENT

   This study attempts to conceptually coherent service creativity efficiency to competent competitive advantage and service performance and investigate the effect of competent competitive advantage on service performance. The research model of this study, service creativity efficiency, is an independent variable. Here, this paper explores the key antecedents which include four factors: competitive perception for differential service, prior knowledge and experience, knowledge sharing, and alertness to opportunities. In addition, the study investigates moderating roles of all constructs: environmental dynamism, team culture and organizational support for new idea generation. This study proposes all of constructs that have positive impacts on each other. Thus, this conceptual model presents the relationships between all of constructs, as shown in Figure 1. For the relation of conceptual model, three theories are utilized. The first is resource-based view (RBV) which explains how firms drive competitive advantages by channeling resource into the...