Employee innovation is critical to business success and draws knowledge and ideas from customer engagement (CE). In particular, customer interaction, a key aspect of CE, offers opportunities for, and act as a source of, hotel employees’ innovative behaviors (Jaakkola & Alexander, 2014; Li & Hsu, 2016). Focusing on the hotel industry, this study investigates the role of customer interaction, positive affect, and employee motivations in enhancing employees’ innovative behaviors. A structural model was developed based on relevant literature and pilot tested on data collected via a quantitative survey of 196 hotel employees who were in a position requiring interactions with customers. The findings provide support for the proposed model and suggest customer interaction, positive affect, and intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as influential factors impacting on employees’ innovative behaviors directly and/or indirectly. This pilot study forms the basis of a larger project modeling the customer interaction - employee innovation relationship (findings to be presented at the conference). The study contributes to the limited literature on innovation through enhancing CB and employee emotional welfare, addressing the call to strengthen research on the antecedents and outcomes of CB (So, King, Sparks, & Wang, 2016). Practically, the results highlight a need for hotels’ benefit and reward systems to incorporate measures of employee performance in relation to CB.

• Fengzeng Xu(ShanDong University, China)
• Ying Wang(Griffith University, Australia)