1. Introduction
Sustainable human resource management has been used as a gateway that connects human resource management to sustainability [
1,
2]. Unlike traditional strategic human resource management practices or policies which focus on ultimate financial and market performance in organizations, sustainable human resource management stresses the importance of managing working people in organizations with sustainable outcomes [
1,
3]. In other words, sustainable human resource management demonstrates a novel perspective and meanings for long-term development and renewal in the relationship between sustainability and human resource management [
2,
4,
5]. In addition, knowledge workers are the essential ingredients of the modern economy [
6]. A corporation can promote business performance through their talented employees with expertise [
7]. Therefore, most hospitality firms now recognize that employees are central to their performance, competitive advantage and even survival. Most important of all, how to promote participation, satisfaction, engagement and performance of employees in working environments has become an important sustainable human resource management issue that has received wide attention from many researchers and managers [
8,
9,
10]. In the related hospitality research fields of job satisfaction, knowledge sharing, innovation management, and organizational performance, most studies view innovation capability as supported by the way employees access, learn, accumulate and utilize knowledge. Innovation capability may thus be closely related to employee performance, and the goal of this research is to empirically study this relationship.
Owing to the paucity of related empirical study in sustainable human resource management, this work first reviewed the related literature and categorized the determinants which may have an important impact on innovation capability with regard to job satisfaction and knowledge sharing processes [
11,
12]. Six hypotheses and a conceptual framework were then produced based on the proposed relationships between each variable and job performance. After that, this research proceeded with 395 samples based on hospitality firms in Taiwan to explore our proposed hypotheses. It is expected that the results of this research will be valuable to both academics and practitioners for sustainable human resource management in hospitality.
2. Literature Review
The meaning of sustainable human resource management is obtaining and sustaining of a necessary competitive advantage from a great many valuable, satisfied and committed employees with effective people management practices [
1,
3,
13]. This concept has been widely used for human outcomes which benefit long term sustainable performance in organizations [
1,
4]. Plenty of terms have been adopted to connect sustainability and human resource management activities including work satisfaction [
14,
15,
16], a knowledge sharing system [
17,
18,
19], the abilities of innovation [
3,
20,
21], and performance at work [
5,
22,
23] These terms may display in diverse approaches for organizational sustainable effectiveness, however, there has been no attempt to integrate them into a research framework to better investigate human and social outcomes particularly in hospitality sectors. Therefore, this study acknowledged that job satisfaction, knowledge sharing, innovation capability, and job performance will influence the extent for working people in an organization together providing positive influences on competitiveness and success of hospitality organizations. The literature review was offered in the following.
2.1. Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction is an important topic, and it is seen as having a wide-ranging number of effects in organizational research. According the suggestion of Locke [
24], job satisfaction means an employee’s positive emotional condition or attachment regarding his or her work. Hulin and Judge [
25] noted that job satisfaction includes multidimensional psychological responses to one’s job, and that such responses have cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. For the organization, job satisfactions mean a workforce that is motivated and committed to high quality performance. In addition, satisfied employees are more likely to have good mental health and be better at making adjustments in their lives [
26]. Locke [
24] proposed that satisfaction is determined by a discrepancy between what one wants in a job and what one has in a job. Judge et al. [
27] argued that there are four core self-evaluations (self-esteem, general self-efficacy, locus of control, and neuroticism) that determine one’s disposition towards job satisfaction. Judge et al. [
28] also stated that higher levels of self-esteem, general self-efficacy, having an internal locus of control, and lower levels of neuroticism lead to higher job satisfaction. Herzberg [
29] stated that there are motivation and hygiene factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction. In addition, motivation can be seen as an inner force that drives individuals to attain personal and organization goals [
30,
31]. Accordingly, for the sustainability in hospitality organization, increased productivity—the quantity and quality of output per hour worked—seems to be a byproduct of greater job satisfaction. In this vein, the implementation of positive working environments can contribute to job satisfaction for important sustainable human resource management practices.
2.2. Knowledge Sharing
The only certainty in the business world is maintaining competitive advantages [
32]. Organizations thus recognize that knowledge constitutes a valuable intangible asset for creating and sustaining competitive advantages [
33], and its value can be shared through knowledge management processes such as the implementations of information systems and business administration [
34]. More specifically, Teece [
35] stated that knowledge management is the tool for organizations to use the most know-how regarding better producing process. In the knowledge management literature, knowledge sharing is an important factor in reaching the goals of knowledge innovation and successful management for both individuals and organizations. Knowledge sharing is a dynamic process where individuals mutually exchange their implicit and explicit knowledge and jointly create new knowledge [
36]. Knowledge sharing is a critical source of value creation [
32], and a successful knowledge-sharing effort requires both the intentions and activities necessary to establish appropriate administrative structures, and facilitate the transfer of knowledge. Knowledge is a competitive advantage, and is a particularly lasting one [
37]. Fagerberg et al. [
38] proposed that successful knowledge sharing had to meet the requirements to improve the process and designs in the firm. Following these arguments, for acquiring a sustainable competitive advantage as well as business performance, knowledge sharing could be regarded as a critical element in sustainable human resource management of hospitality organizations.
2.3. Innovation Capability
Innovation is a key topic in the study of business, entrepreneurship, economics, technology, and knowledge management, and improves the firm performance by methods of better design, quality, process and customer satisfaction. Croitoru [
39] noted that innovation is a prime mover of economic change, while Thompson et al. [
40] defined it as the generation, acceptance, and implementation of new ideas, processes, products, or services. Amabile et al. [
41] examined the environmental and work factors conducive to creativity and innovation. Van de Ven [
42] stated that the process of innovation process involves the development and implementation of new ideas, and Tidd et al. [
43] claimed that managers are able to aid this by the identification and development of core competencies, the constraints imposed by different technologies and markets, and the structures and processes for organizational learning. Leonard [
44] defined innovation capability as the ability to create new and useful knowledge based on previous knowledge. Burgelman et al. [
45] defined technological innovation as innovation strategies that are supported by organizations. Since innovation capability is to manage different key organizational capabilities and resources successfully [
46,
47], human resource practitioners could promote the application of innovation activities with sustainable business practices in hospitality organizations.
2.4. Job Performance
Performance is one of the major methods used to measure the achievement of an organization’s target goals. However, according to a literature review, performance research has done little to aid managerial decision-making in practice. More than two decades ago, Banks et al. [
48] warned that this apparent gap between performance research and practice would increase, while Napier et al. [
49] suggested that the progress on performance practice has lagged because the research which might inform it has been neglected. Bretz et al. [
50] concluded that better understanding of organizational contexts in performance research would contribute to better performance in practice. McCrae et al. [
51] examined the Big Five personality dimensions and their relationship with job performance. Campbell [
52] suggested determinants of performance components, and stated that individual differences on performance are mainly due to three determinants: declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge and motivation. Accordingly, with a concept of the human dimension for sustainability, how employees sustain valuable human resources at work could be associated with higher levels of performance. Furthermore, it contributes to the understanding of promoting job performance as a constitutive perspective of organizational sustainability, and could be accepted as an extremely important criterion that is strongly related to hospitality organizational outcomes and success.
6. Discussion
Our research findings offer several theoretical contributions and practical implications for sustainable human resource management in the hospitality industry. First, in line with prior research in human resource practices and sustainable management [
1,
3,
5,
10], this study presents a new perspective to people management looking for long-term human resource development in hospitality [
1,
2]. In other words, unlike traditional strategic human resource management which focuses on only financial or market performance, sustainable human resource management seeks for managing working people in organizations with sustainable outcomes [
1,
3]. More specifically, the empirical results of this study provide evidence for hospitality sectors that sustainable human resource management could be regarded as a gateway that connects human resource management to sustainability [
1,
2].
Second, though sustainable human resource management is obtaining and sustaining competitive advantage from valuable employees with effective people management practices [
3,
13], previous studies had no attempt to discover the linkage between sustainability and human resource management practices such as work satisfaction, knowledge sharing mechanism, innovation abilities, and performance at work. Therefore, to clarify the attributes of sustainable human and social outcomes for value-added contribution and success in running business, this study contributes to literatures that testified an integrated model with SEM analyses that coordinate the dynamic linking mechanism for job satisfaction, knowledge sharing, innovation capability, and job performance of working people in hospitality organizations.
Furthermore, in the rapidly changing and competitive global economy, hospitality companies need to organize professional and successful services for tourists. As this research sample was composed of hospitality companies, it is important to discuss the specific findings for the future development and sustainable human resource management of such firms. Our research findings revealed that hospitality organizations could develop an appropriate environment inside the organization to foster both job satisfaction and knowledge sharing, as this can greatly aid innovation. In other words, this study supports appropriate environments wherein job satisfaction can be created and strengthened by utilizing knowledge sharing processes. Expending prior human resource management research in hospitality [
10,
23], the results of this study also provided empirical support for the critical positive mediating effects of knowledge sharing in the relationship between job satisfaction and innovation capability.
Moreover, this study supports that job performance is derived from innovation capability at hospitality companies, and this means that innovation is the sum of all the employees’ efforts in the hospitality organization. In other words, hotel companies are situated at a pivotal position to build internal mechanisms to enhance the self-efficacy and effectiveness of workers. In this regard, our research findings can provide ideas for firms to develop and consolidate the relationship among employee job satisfaction, knowledge sharing, innovation capability, and job performance. Most important of all, our research findings are valuable for both leading companies in international tourist hotels and local hotels, in that they point to a way to create and utilize innovation capability with different organizational forms. More specifically, considering the moderating influences of different organizational forms, employees in international tourist hotels could have higher job satisfaction as well as knowledge sharing behaviors which lead to greater innovation capability than those in local hotels. In this vein, future hospitality research can also highlight the influence of innovation capability on job performance and take other factors or various samples of organizational level into multi-level consideration for sustainable human resource management.
Last but not least, as for practical implications, we suggest human resource managers or hoteliers could focus on employee training for continuous growth of sustainable human resource management in hospitality organizations. Together with job design and staff recruitment, training programs could contribute to workers’ psychological capital, emotional stabilization, and organizational performance even in diverse turbulent circumstances [
81,
82]. Most important of all, after taking well-organized training courses, employees’ high level of satisfaction toward training could thus promote their knowledge and skills at work allowing better job satisfaction, high knowledge sharing behavior, enhanced innovation capability as well as overall job performance [
83]. This implication of training programs is essential for business sustainability, and provides broader benefits for hospitality organizations in terms of employees’ overall commitment, satisfaction and engagement toward work with a lower likelihood to quit [
8]. Therefore, hotel practitioners for sustainable human resource management could organize plans for conducting employee training via formalized training programs, and develop participants’ positive psychological capital for improving their job performance.