The impact of employees’ perceived restaurant innovativeness on adaptive behavior: The mediating role of job engagement

This study aims to investigate how employees' perception of a restaurant's innovativeness influences their adaptive behavior during service delivery. The proposed research model was developed based on the Stimuli-Organism-Response model, and thus, employees' job engagement was introduced as an underlying process. The data were collected from U.S. full-service restaurant employees through an online survey with a self-administered questionnaire. A two-step approach of structural equation modeling and bootstrapping techniques were employed for data analysis. The study found that restaurant employees demonstrate a different type of adaptive behavior when interacting with customers based on their perception of restaurant innovativeness. Particularly, the influence of perceived restaurant innovativeness on interpersonal adaptive behavior requires employees' internal mechanisms while employees may not need to go through the same internal process for service offering adaptive behavior. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.