How to fuel hotel employees’ daily innovative work? The interplay of daily affect and career future time perspective

Innovation is viewed as a critical factor in the survival and success of service providers. This study aims to uncover the influence of daily affective experience such as daily positive and negative affect, supervisor creativity support, and career future time perspective in frontline employees’ daily innovative service behavior. Drawing on the conservation of resource and broaden and build theory, we theorize that daily affect and supervisor creativity support contribute to frontline employees’ daily innovative service behavior. In this study, we collected data from 194 hotel employees over a period of 2 weeks. The results showed that both daily positive and negative affect predict daily innovative service behavior. Furthermore, the results showed that the strength of the relationship between daily negative affect and daily innovative service behavior was stronger when employees’ career future time perspective levels were low. Specifically, frontline employees’ daily innovative service behavior was high when career future time perspective was also high, regardless of the level of daily negative affect. The theoretical and practical implications are argued in discussion section.