Firms in all industries depend vitally on technology (Peppard & Ward, 2004). Hospitality companies attempt to understand how technologies can grant them competitive advantages through enhanced productivity and value maximization (Buhalis, 1998). But not all firms enjoy competitive advantages through technology. Instead, the impacts of technology depend on a plethora of factors.<\/p>\n
Technology, including information technology, online platforms, and social media, has revolutionized the global market and, perhaps even more important, provided new opportunities to engage and harness resources from customers and employees, such that firms can more readily gain valuable ideas, feedback, and other useful information (Bilgihan, Okumus, Khal Nusair, & Joon-Wuk Kwun, 2011; Chahal & Kumar, 2014; Hammedi et al., 2015; Zhang, Kandampully, & Bilgihan, 2015).<\/p>\n
Firms such as Marriott, Hilton, Starbucks, Disney, and Starwood have transformed themselves into \u201cpeople technology hybrid organizations\u201d. The newly adopted strategies enable organizations to use technology to engage with and reap the creativity of their employees and customers, to co-innovate new products and services. Such hybrid firms recognize the role of technology as an enabler, but they also understand that trust and emotional engagement with people (Akroush, Abu-ElSamen, Samawi, & Odetallah, 2013), both within and outside the organization (Harrison-Walker, 2001), are essential to the transformation of the firm through creativity and innovation.<\/p>\n
In the past, firms often viewed each customer as a single entity. But today, customers are gradually considered as \u201csocial customers\u201d who are always into Word-of-Mouth activities on online and offline contexts (Gligorijevic & Luck, 2012). Social customers represent the voices and thoughts of hundreds or thousands of like-minded individuals (Bugshan, 2014; Zhang et al., 2015). Firms thus recognize that engaging and enabling social customers is an effective strategy.<\/p>\n
Customer behaviours are shaped by providers, while employee performance and commitment are shaped by the organizations they are embedded within (Wong, 2015). Affectively committed customers exhibit a strong motivation to help a firm improve its business and show a great need to maintain positive relationships with the firm’s frontline employees (Salanova, Sonia, & Jose, 2005). Therefore, organizational citizenship behaviour is another key factor that could influence the performance of people for the organizational success. Citizenship behaviour aimed at the organization includes activities such as promoting a hotel’s products and making favourable comments about the property outside of work (Gracia, Bakker, & Grau, 2011; Liu & Mattila, 2015; Wu, Sturman, and Wang 2013, Wu, Tse, Fu, Kwan, & Liu, 2013). Citizenship behaviour in support of co-workers includes assisting them as needed and taking time to listen to co-workers\u2019 concerns (Ma, Qu, Wilson, & Eastman, 2013; Wu, Sturman et al., 2013, Wu, Tse et al., 2013). Customer-focused citizenship behaviour includes activities such as maintaining a positive attitude at work and performing duties carefully and accurately (Ma et al., 2013; Wu, Sturman et al., 2013, Wu, Tse et al., 2013). Furthermore, employee empowerment is widely viewed as a promising approach to improve operating efficiency and customer service (Zoghbi-Manrique-de-Lara, Suarez- Acosta, & Aguiar-Quintana, 2014).<\/p>\n
Similarly, many firms acknowledge the importance of engaging and nurturing the creativity of their employees. Such firms offer initiatives to ensure the people within the organization have appropriate environments and support, to nurture their creativity and innovation (Kim, Im, & Slater, 2013; O’Reilly & Pfeffer, 2000). The creativity of employees and customers must be harnessed, through technology, to enable the organization to undertake ongoing innovation. As an enabler, technology provides customers direct access to the internal workings of the firm, because the two entities partner in creative innovations, in which technology and people interact dynamically (Barile & Saviano, 2014). The role of organizations to engage in activities to encourage, value and reward innovation and creativity efforts is becoming more relevant in contemporary organizations.<\/p>\n
Innovation is one of the key factors to firm success (Ngo & O’Cass, 2013), and the main driver of innovation is the creative minds of the people who make up organizations (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2003). Technology provides an exciting sense of innovation for many customers, even if the feelings may be short lived if the technology is emulated by competitors. Still, this capability helps hospitality firms capture the imagination of many customers. Creating a mechanism to allow firms to tap into people’s creative minds thus has become a strategic priority of many leading hospitality organizations. Early research associated innovation with activities within the organization, with the assumption that innovations reside inside the firm. But more recent studies instead claim that individual users who \u2018\u2018set the trend\u201d for others and have certain technical knowledge are increasingly important to organizations (Chandra & Leenders, 2012). Customers are very valuable sources of innovation (Chesbrough, 2006; Kandampully et al., 2015), and their ideas and knowledge become more accessible online. Effectively bringing together both employees and customers to establish relationships with the firm can assist in and advance creative innovation. In this competitive hospitality market, gaining market leadership is a challenging task. The need for dramatic changes in the way hospitality firms operate today is due to the extensive changes in hotel guests’ adoption and use of mobile and self-service technology.<\/p>\n
The role of organizations to engage in activities to encourage, value and reward innovation and creativity efforts is becoming more relevant in contemporary organizations. Further, the adoption of innovation is easier when organizations have organic rather than mechanistic characteristics (Damanpour, 1991). Such organic organizations have a greater variety of specialists that would provide a broader knowledge base.<\/p>\n
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