Employee Engagement and Job Performance in Pasikuda Hotels: The Mediating Role of Creative Behavior of Employees

Abstract

The hotel industry in Sri Lanka has been growing significantly in the past years. The need for creative behavior among the hotel employees is inevitable. Inducing creative behavior among the hotel employees is considered as very important strategy element in hotels. This study investigates the relationship between employee engagement and job performance and the mediating role of creative behavior of employees of selected Pasikuda hotels. This study is implemented with of three dimensions of employee engagement, namely vigor, dedication and absorption and job performance is as the dependent variable. Job performance is measured using two dimensions, task performance and contextual performance. Creative behavior functioned as a mediator between the two variables. Creative behavior included with two dimensions, namely idea exploration and idea generation. This study eliminates the empirical knowledge gap in the Pasikuda area regarding mediating role of creative behavior between employee engagement and job performance. Using questionnaire, the data were collected from 148 employees of 10 selected hotels in Pasikuda. The collected data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, correlation, regression and mediating analyses. The questionnaire included established measures relating to employee engagement, job performance and creative behavior in addition to various demographic questions. The findings reveal that the employee engagement, creative behavior and job performance are in high level among the respondents. The analyses stated the strong positive relationship between the employee engagement and job performance, the strong positive relationship between the employee engagement and creative behavior and the strong positive relationship between job performance and creative behavior. Creative behavior has been found to cast a partial mediating effect on the relationship between employee engagement and job performance.

Keywords: Employee Engagement (EE), Job Performance (JP), Creative Behavior (CB)