Study On The Effect Of Tacit Knowledge Sharing Behavior On The Service Innovation Behavior Of Hotel Staff

As the service economy is dominating the national economy gradually, more andmore enterprises now recognize the need and importance of combining knowledge、technology development and innovation together. As for hotels, its service productsare easy to be imitated and without patent protection, all the characteristics makehotels to maintain or enhance sustainable competiveness through continuous serviceinnovation. And the frontline employees are decided to be the main producers ofservice innovation for hotel service is produced and consumed simultaneously.Meanwhile, with the arrival of the era of knowledge economy, knowledge andinformation has become an important driving force for enterprises to achieveinnovation and development, among which tacit knowledge constitutes the maincontent of knowledge system. How to manage the tacit knowledge of frontline staffand take advantage of it to promote their service innovation behavior is becoming animportant topic in hotel knowledge management.Based on the existing literature home and abroad, this paper takes “tacit knowledgesharing” as an entry point, taking frontline staff from8deluxe hotels as examples,trying to discuss the relationship and effect of tacit knowledge sharing behavior onservice innovation behavior. The paper aims to provide a new perspective to the studyof hotel service innovation.The conclusions of the empirical study are as follows:First, the tacit knowledge sharing behavior has three antecedent variables which aretacit knowledge sharing attitude, tacit knowledge sharing intention and tacitknowledge sharing climate. And the three dimensions all have significant positiveimpact on tacit knowledge sharing behavior;Second, tacit knowledge sharing behavior has significant positive impact on thetwo stages of service innovation behavior;Third, results of multiple regression analysis show the mediation effect of serviceinnovation concept creation between tacit knowledge sharing and service innovationconcept performance;Fourth, the paper explores the differences of each variable based on the demographic characteristics of the frontline staff. Gender and education showsignificant difference on study variables.At last, the paper summarizes the research findings and proposes countermeasuresto tacit knowledge management which aim to help stimulate service innovationbehaviors of frontline staff in hotels, including: changing hotel managers’ attitude ontacit knowledge management; building tacit knowledge management system and soon. And then it reviews the limitations of this study and put forward a further outlookon future research directions.