THE ROLE OF EMPLOYEES AND MANAGERS IN HOTEL INNOVATION - EVIDENCE FROM BRASOV COUNTY

This paper seeks to relate the effects of human resource management on innovation, from the perspectives of both employees and managers in the hotel area. The first part of the article consists from a literature review for hotel innovation. Thus, the innovation processes could be very diverse due to the different approaches to new developed products or services from the tourism area. Within the hotel industry human resource has become one crucial element for innovation, mainly because of the increasing role of the customer-contact employee. Considering the specificity of the Romanian hotel industry we appreciate that emphasizing the human resource role could generate and sustain a competitive advantage in a more dynamic environment. Within human resource approach, we point out that training program for employees and managers' expertise are important factors in sustaining innovation. Therefore, three hypotheses are stated. Two of them refer to the training programs while the last one to the managers' expertise. All of them are confirmed by the study's findings. The second part of the study consists of developing findings for the region of Brasov County based on the presented research methodology. We consider two dependent variables, innovation decision and innovation level, respectively. Our goal is to determine the correlations between those two and the explanatory variables referring to employees and managers- training, constant training, occasional training, manager's experience and manager's education. The results demonstrate the need for an articulated training process in the hotel industry with a stronger emphasis on managers from the view of making decision process. On the other side, the role of employees is obvious when these decisions should be implemented. Meanwhile, the interference between the two categories is more and more intense due to the increasing process of employee empowerment within the hotel industry area. Thus, innovation could become a more competitive weapon and a source of increasing efficiency, also.