Stimulating Employee Innovation in Hospitality: A Moderated Mediation Model of Work-Related Flow and Proactive Personality

In the hospitality industry’s era of digital transformation and increasing service complexity, cultivating employees’ innovative and customer-oriented behaviors is vital for sustained competitiveness. This study examines how multilevel stimuli, which are digital technology self-efficacy, coworker support, and management support, shape three critical employee outcomes: innovative work behavior (IWB), customer-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (COOCB), and active responses to entitled customer demands (AR), via work-related flow as the mediator and proactive personality as a moderator. Grounded in the Stimulus-Organism-Response framework, Flow Theory, and Trait-Activation-Theory, matched survey data from 382 employees and 126 supervisors in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) four- and five-star hotels were analyzed. Using hierarchical linear modeling and the PROCESS macro, results show that multilevel stimuli significantly affect work-related flow and the employee behaviors (IWB, COOCB, and AR). Work-related flow mediates multilevel stimuli–IWB relationships, while proactive personality moderates several critical paths. This study also examined the moderated mediation effect of proactive personality. The study advances theory by integrating mechanisms and boundary conditions of work-related flow in hospitality, explaining how digital and hotel resources foster or hinder innovation and customer-oriented behaviors, and offering practical strategies for supportive, high-involvement workplaces.