Abstract
The research primarily seeks to understand how supervisor support can directly and indirectly enhance the service innovative behavior (SIB) of flight attendants via work engagement. Moreover, although there has been some research on the effect of group diversity on organizational performance, the results have not been consistent. Thus, this study addresses this gap by investigating how work group diversity can make variance in the relationship between work engagement and innovative behavior of flight attendants. The sample size of 242 flight attendants working at the central airport in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, has been taken for the study. To test hypotheses, structural equation modeling and bootstrapping were employed. This study provided an evidence for the positive nexus between perceived supervisor support and SIB. Additionally, the results shed light on a mediation mechanism of work engagement for the association between flight attendants’ perception of their supervisor and innovative behavior. Furthermore, tenure diversity and job position diversity in a work group were proved to play a moderating role in the relationship between work engagement and service innovative behavior. Specifically, flight attendants are more willing to exhibit innovative behaviors when working in a homogeneous group in terms of tenure and job position rather than in a heterogeneous group. The empirical results contributed to the diversity management literature and broadened the understanding of how to activate the service innovative behavior of employees. From a managerial perspective, managers should pay attention to the characteristics of employees when organizing teamwork. AcknowledgmentThe authors are grateful to the anonymous referees of the journal for their extremely useful suggestions for improving the quality of this paper.
Highlights
As an emerging economy (Hai et al, 2020), Vietnam has one of the fastest growing aviation industries (Lalk, 2019)
DF = 4.082; TLI = 0.847; CFI = 0. 875; SRMR = 0. 069; RMSEA = 0.113), a 3-factor model collapsing As illustrated in Table 2, composite reliability of perceived supervisor support, work engagement, the proposed model ranges from 0.949 to 0.963, ground diversity, and tenure diversity (CMIN/ which is over the threshold of 0.7 (Bagozzi & Yi, DF = 4.353; TLI = 0.833; CFI = 0. 862; SRMR = 0. 1988)
Work engagement is in turn signifi- and low value of a moderator (Preacher et al, cantly correlated with service innovative behavior 2006)
Summary
As an emerging economy (Hai et al, 2020), Vietnam has one of the fastest growing aviation industries (Lalk, 2019). Vietnam would benefit from 2.9% annual GDP growth over the period 2014–2020, driven by aviation (Laplace et al, 2019). Quality control in the aviation service is the top priority for Vietnam (Fan et al, 2017). Quality assurance in aviation services is widely studied among scholars (Angelov, 2019; Soekkha, 2020; Volynkina & Solohin, 2020; Webster et al, 2020) to effectively meet the growing customer demand and attract returns (Bock et al, 2016). Organizations want to deliver high quality services by requiring employees to go beyond their assigned customer service role (Garg & Dhar, 2016). One of the out-role behaviors that ensure the sustainable growth of airlines in a continuously changing global market is innovative behavior (Franke, 2007)
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