Employee Engagement as a Mediator to Role Benefit and Innovative Behavior (Evidence from Balinese Five-Star Hotel Employees)

. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic is being felt throughout the entire hospitality ecosystem in Bali, including premium hotels, which have been slowest to recover due to the lack of international tourists. Meanwhile, employee engagement has become one of the most prominent primacies for human resource managers and practitioners due to lockdown. This study investigates the link between employee engagement, role benefit, and innovative behavior of five-star hotel employees in Bali during the outbreak. Data were obtained through an online questionnaire in March 2022. This study examines a sample of 241 whose data was analyzed in structural equation modeling. The results indicate that role benefit directly affected both employee engagement and innovative behavior, while employee engagement had a direct positive effect on innovative behavior. Thus, role benefit positively affected innovative behavior directly and indirectly via employee engagement. These findings can add to the existing literature on how role benefit and employee engagement affect the innovative behavior of five-star hotel employees and provide practical recommendations for policymakers and industry leaders to promote those outcomes in Bali.


Introduction
During the COVID-19 pandemic, five-star hotels in Bali, Indonesia, experienced significant losses and various difficulties in recovering (Suryaningsih and Oka 2021, Kusuma et al. 2021).These hotels have to deal with this uncertainty of turbulent industry conditions by utilizing all their assets and resources.Employees are essential assets, and their engagement in the workplace could drive business improvement and encourage organizational change (Tensay and Singh, 2020;Jena et al. 2018).Several sources claim that employee engagement could be a strategic approach for businesses to deal with uncertainty during the pandemic (De-la-Calle-Durán and Rodríguez-Sánchez 2021).Thus, examining and managing employee engagement in the workplace is crucial, particularly for the hospitality sector.It also means that employers of five-star Balinese hotels urgently need to understand the factors that can influence engaged employees to increase among employees of the five-star hotels on the island.However, this concept remains ambiguous in the academic community.Therefore, further research is needed to validate this concept.Given that the tourism industry is a significant contributor to Bali's economy, more research is needed to improve our understanding of employee engagement in the context of five-star hotels in Bali.Therefore, this study aims to examine whether role benefit positively affect employee engagement and whether employee engagement positively affects the employees' innovative behavior.Also, this study attempts to investigate whether role benefit positively impact employees' innovative behavior at five-star hotels in Bali during the COVID-19 pandemic.The findings can add to the existing literature on employee engagement during the pandemic and the relationship between role benefit, employee engagement, and employees' innovative behavior from the perspective of five-star hotel employees in Bali.Furthermore, the study's findings can be used to recommend the company, particularly the Human Resources department, to examine and improve employee engagement during the coronavirus pandemic.It could provide the organization with an essential role in developing a human resource development strategy to increase productivity during the crisis.

Employee Engagement
Employee engagement refers to an organizational management practice that determines how strong the involvement and enthusiasm of employees are in the workplace to the point where they positively influence coworkers, hence increasing workplace interest ( The Aon Hewitt engagement model describes employee engagement as the level of emotions, rational thought, behaviors, and intentions invested in the organization by employees (Hinzmann et al. 2019).Employees can be categorized as engaged employees when they have all the criteria explained in the Say, Stay, and Strive model.For example, they speak positively about the organization to coworkers, potential employees, and customers; they feel a strong sense of belonging and desire to be a part of the organization; they put forth 100% effort in their work for its success (Aon Hewitt 2015).

Role Benefit
Role benefit is defined as a benefit that employees obtain as a result of their role within the firm (Sheemun et al. 2013).Role benefit has become more and more important now because of many circumstances, including specific environmental factors.Employers in numerous countries, unlike in the United States, are required by law to provide certain sorts of benefits to their employees including an obligatory pension and health insurance.In today's tight job markets, it becomes evident that role benefit perceived by employees within the organization can be a potent weapon for leveraging organizational competitiveness, making a long-term plan to attract as well as maintain employees in the workplace and Maja 2020).Furthermore, role benefits might also be able to push employees to be more productive in the workplace.The main issue of role benefit stems from the fact that each employee has their own perception of a benefits package, and their wish for role benefits to be achieved is likely to be different from one and another employee ( and Maja 2020).Traditional role benefit perceived by employees were likely designed to fulfill the needs of a family, relatively in circumstances of a working male head of household, a stay-at-home female spouse, and two or three children in the family.The demographics, on the other hand, have shifted as well.Generational disparities should most likely be considered nowadays, for example baby boomers, millennials, and gen Z. Millennials will soon constitute the majority in the workforce around the world, thus role benefits given should reflect their ideals, preference, and lifestyle (Kultalahti and Viitala 2014).Based on findings by Renaud et al. (2017), role benefit can be classified into four broad categories: traditional benefits (private group insurance plans and pension plans), paid days off (vacation and parental leave), work-life balance programs (employee assistance, employee wellness, and flexible work arrangements), and bonuses (car reimbursement, parking, product and/or service discounts, personal loans, paid meals, and club memberships).On the other hand, Sieber (1974) divided the role benefits received by employees within the organizations into four categories: (1) role privileges; (2) overall status security; (3) personality enrichment and ego gratification; and (4) resources for status enhancement.Similarly, Sheemun et al (2013) declared that the benefits are generally in the form of opportunities for professional visibility, diversity, career advancement, and even fun/exciting benefits such as bonuses and vacation tickets.This study assumes that an impression of role benefits perceived by employees can boost their commitment to the job, increase employee engagement in the workplace.

Innovative Behavior
Innovative behavior is defined as the deliberate introduction of new ideas, products, and procedures by employees in their work roles, workplaces, or organizational structures.John and Jagathy Raj (2020) said innovative behavior is an employee's attitude that they implement in their work role which is linked to the creation and execution of new ideas.Simply put, it is a set of processes, a mindset, and an action to generate new process, product, and service ideas.Furthermore, Vithayaporn and Ashton (2020) argued that innovative work behavior of employees means an ability toward recognizing an issue, generating ideas, mobilizing support, and realizing ideas connected to solve the initial problem.The main objective of engaging in innovative behaviors is to produce innovations within the organization (Anderson et al. 2014).This encompasses behaviors relevant to the innovation process, such as concept generation, idea promotion, and idea realization (Vithayaporn and Ashton 2020).Meanwhile, Guzman et al. (2016) stated that innovative behavior of employees encompasses more than just creative action or mindset.It also includes the act of initiating new yet helpful ideas, processes, products, or procedures inside a working role, group, or organization.Generally, the literature on innovative work behavior has two approaches which are efficiency-oriented and social-political.The social-political perspective emphasizes the symbolic role of innovative activities and the implications of image consideration on innovation decisions beyond an efficiency calculation (Yuan and Woodman 2010).On the other hand, the efficiency-oriented viewpoint is based on a rational approach to innovation decisions, in which organizational improvements are the outcome of staff actions (Roy and Seguin 2000).Differ from the socialpolitical perspective, the efficiency-oriented perspective assumes that employees' innovative conduct is beneficial to the organization.Employees that highly engage in the workplace might send out pioneering messages to colleagues and management inside the organization, drawing their attention to the innovative behavior process.These workers take on the role of active innovators within the company.These findings argue that the key to successful innovative work behavior is if the management creates an internal climate that encourages employees to innovate.To date, there are very limited studies that investigate the association between employee engagement and innovative behavior.However, numerous findings have explained that employees who are highly engaged in the workplace have a lot of energy and are enthusiastic about their jobs compared to those who are disengaged (Slatten and Mehmetoglu 2011, Guzman et al. 2016).The different features of an employee engagement including energy, devotion, and absorption all imply that this certain employee is in a good mood.As previously stated, Guzman et al. ( 2016) described employee engagement as a pleasant frame of mind.As a result, the feeling of positive emotions is linked to employee engagement in the workplace.In addition, past research has shown that persons in a cheerful mood are more open to new chances at work, more talkative, and engage in helpful and serviceoriented behaviors toward others (Guzman et al. 2016, Vithayaporn and Ashton 2020).Furthermore, Vithayaporn and Ashton (2020) stated that creativity is linked to happy feelings, for example joy as one of a form of positive feeling.This positive feeling can "broaden" an employee's momentary thought-action repertoire by increasing the number of possible thoughts and acts that come to mind (Fredrickson, 2001).Consequently, a happy emotional state aids an employee's ability to be more creative when providing a service (Yuan, 2015).Simply, this has meant that past research has shown that pleasant emotions, which are implicit in employee engagement, are linked to both behavior and creativity or what can be referred to as innovative behavior (Vithayaporn and Ashton 2020).Given this nature of employee engagement in relation to innovative behavior, it is reasonable to believe and assume that there is a significant relationship between employee engagement and the emergence of innovative behavior in the workplace.This study aims to demonstrate that employee engagement is favorably related to employees' innovative behavior using empirical studies from certain industry perspectives and based on prior findings as well as relevant literature.

Hypothesis Development
Employee engagement is motivated by various factors, although it is usually accepted that technological preparedness, leadership, and personality are important antecedents to increasing employee engagement in the workplace (Manjaree and Perera 2021, Albrecht and Marty 2020).However, a research investigation shows a different perspective.Sheemun et al. (2013) argued that role benefit is significantly linked to employee engagement.Therefore, role benefit has become more and more important, especially in today's tight job markets where it becomes evident that role benefit perceived by employees within the organization can be a potent weapon for leveraging organizational competitiveness, making a long-term plan to attract and 2020).Furthermore, Sheemun et al. (2013) declared that the benefits are generally in the form of opportunities for professional visibility, diversity, career advancement, and even fun/exciting benefits such as bonuses and vacation tickets.This study assumes that employees' impression of role benefit can increase their commitment to the job and increase employee engagement in the workplace.It has meant that role benefit perceived by employees are positively related to employee engagement (Slatten and Mehmetoglu 2011, Sheemun et al. 2013).However, more research is needed to confirm the contradictory conclusions.Therefore, based on the discussion, hypothesis 1 of this study is: H1: There is a positive relationship between Role Benefit and Employee Engagement.In addition, some sources reveal that high employee engagement has always been associated with improvement in employee performance as well as fresh innovation, which would improve overall business performance to meet the targets/objectives of the business (Tensay and Singh 2020, John and Jagathy Raj 2020, Tannady et al. 2019).Numerous findings have explained that employees who are highly engaged in the workplace have a lot of energy and are enthusiastic about their jobs compared to disengaged employees (Slatten and Mehmetoglu 2011, Guzman et al. 2016).The different employee engagement features, including energy, devotion, and absorption, all imply that this particular employee is in a good mood.As previously stated, Guzman et al. (2016) describe employee engagement as a pleasant frame of mind.As a result, the feeling of positive emotions is linked to employee engagement in the workplace.Those positive emotional states that come with engagement have two consequences that can help an employee think of new ways to do things at work (Guzman et al. 2016).Vithayaporn and Ashton (2020) stated that creativity is linked to happy feelings, for example, joy is a form of positive feeling.This positive feeling can broaden an employee's momentary thought-action repertoire by increasing the number of possible thoughts and acts that come to mind.Consequently, a happy emotional state aids an employee's ability to be more creative when providing a service.This has meant that past research has shown that pleasant emotions, which are implicit in employee engagement, are linked to both behavior and creativity or what can be referred to as innovative behavior (Vithayaporn and Ashton 2020).Given this nature of employee engagement concerning innovative behavior, it is reasonable to believe and assume a significant relationship between employee engagement and the emergence of innovative behavior in the workplace.Therefore, this study aims to demonstrate that employee engagement is favorably related to employees' innovative behavior using empirical studies from specific industry perspectives and based on prior findings and relevant literature.Therefore, based on the discussion, hypothesis 2 of this study is: H2: There is a positive relationship between Employee Engagement and Innovative Behavior.
Despite aiming to validate further and investigate the nexus between employee engagement and role benefit and employee engagement and innovative behavior, this study also examines whether there is a relationship between role benefit and innovative behavior of employees in five-star hotels in Bali during the COVID-19 pandemic.Therefore, based on the discussion, hypothesis 3 of this study is: H3: There is a positive relationship between Role Benefit and Innovative Behavior.

Methods
This investigation focused on employees of five-star hotels in Bali province, limited to those who had still worked during the COVID-19 pandemic up to March 2022.Furthermore, this study took place in the province of Bali due to several reasons.First, most starred hotels in Indonesia are mainly populated in Bali province.According to Badan Pusat Statistik Provinsi Bali (2022), the five provinces with the most star hotels are Bali (507) and West Java (495), respectively, followed by Jakarta, Central Java, and East Java.Next, we noticed the importance of the hotel business to Bali's economy, a significant contributor to the entire economy of the province, if not the country.Amerta (2017) reported that the island of Bali is divided into nine regencies, as illustrated in Figure 2.However, this study was conducted in only five of Bali's regencies: Badung, Denpasar, Gianyar, Karangasem, and Tabanan, due to the absence of five-star hotels in the other four (Buleleng, Jembrana, Bangli, and Klungkung).The formula provides a statistical metric for determining the minimum sample required to ensure that the survey findings are reasonably accurate.It allows researchers to sample the study's population accurately.The confidence level in this study is set at 95%, which means that the error tolerance is set at 5%.Based on this guideline, the minimum sample size for this study is 147 respondents.Data analysis techniques used in this study include outer loading, reliability and validity test, VIF test, regression, and hypothesis testing.Hair et al (2014) suggested that low outer loadings of less than 0.40 should always be avoided in the design.If the low outer loadings are between 0.4 to 0.7, the amount to which their removal affects content dependability and validity should be considered while deciding whether to delete those indicators.Before automatically removing an indicator when its outer loading value falls below 0.7, the writer should explore the consequences of item removal on the reliability and validity test findings.If deleting an indicator causes the Cronbach's alpha and average variance extracted to rise over the recommended threshold value, then this indicator should be removed.

Data Collection
The online questionnaire was distributed using an online approach that included giving questionnaires to human resources for distribution among the five-star hotel employees and delivering questionnaires directly to the employees for distribution within-or cross-department.The respondents for this survey were selected using the convenience sampling method.This sampling method is a non-probability/non-random sampling method in which individuals from the target population who meet specific practical criteria are chosen.The subjects responded to a seven-point Likert-type scale for all items.

Fig. 3. Research model
The questionnaire consisted of two main sections that covered the three constructs in the conceptual model in Figure 3: Section A, respondent background (5 characteristics) and section B, set of questionnaires (18 items) from the sub-section of Role Benefit, Employee Engagement, and Innovative Behavior.The first section comprised questionnaire items related to employee engagement (see Table 1).The survey items used for employee engagement were from Schaufeli et al. (2002) and modified.The second section consisted of questionnaire items related to role benefit (see Table 2).The six items used for this construct was from Sieber (1974).The third section measured innovative behavior (see Table 3).The six items for this construct were modified from Janssen (2000).

Numerical Results
As presented in Table 4, the outer loading values of all measurement items are greater than 0.7, except RB1.The outer loading value of RB1 which is 0.559 did not pass since the value is lower than 0.7, indicating that RB1 is not capable of describing the idea to that level.The authors assume that RB1 results in low outer loading values due to a confusing and ambiguous statement of "stepping stone" used in the online questionnaire.Based on Hair et al (2014), the RB1 had to be removed in this study since the alpha and the average variance extracted from numerous measurement items all increase in values after deleting the RB1, becoming higher than the recommended threshold.As shown in Table 4 engagement, role benefit, and innovative behavior are 0.933, 0.871, and 0.902, respectively.Those values indicate that all variables are reliable since those value exceed the minimum threshold of 0.7 (Hidayat et al. 2021).All values are higher than the threshold of Cronbach's Alpha which is 0.7, meaning that employee engagement, role benefit, and innovative behavior are fundamentally consistent and reliable variables to use in this study.In Table 5, the VIF values for regression model in this study are all less than 5.The VIF value of employee engagement and innovative behavior are 1.00 and 3.32, indicating that multicollinearity between the exogenous variables does not exist.As a result, a statistically significant conclusion may be drawn that multicollinearity does not exist for all exogenous variables in the regression model.4), therefore, hypothesis 3 is supported.Practically, the findings provide a clear and deeper understanding of employee engagement during the pandemic, which can be used by the management of the hotels, particularly the Human Resources department, to examine and stimulate its business growth and productivity.In addition, to encourage employees' Innovative Behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic within their organizations, the best option is to recognize an approach to increase Role Benefit perceived by the employees and increase employee engagement.Therefore, hotel management is advised to increase the Role Benefits perceived by their employees in the workplace.An increase in role benefits will further improve employee engagement and innovative behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, which could stimulate business growth and productivity.However, when it comes to boosting employee role perks/benefits, the perception or standard set by the management may not always be the same as the employee's expectation or perception (Sutikno 2019).Therefore, hotel management should design more suitable role benefit packages.The recommended packages should include health insurance and emphasize resources obtained due to their role within the firm.Health insurance is essential amid the COVID-19 pandemic to show that the company has a solid commitment to ensuring the safety and health of employees.A safe and healthy environment in the workplace will indirectly enhance visitors' confidence in using the hotel's services and accommodation.Moreover, this type of role benefits should rearrange to improve the experiences.Reimbursements and bonuses could be a great arrangement, so employees can use their benefits even if they work remotely.Not only benefiting the employees, but this arrangement also brings many advantages to the company.Rather than giving the employees allowances upfront, hotel management compensates employees for their health and wellness expenses.It allows the management to control eligibility for reimbursement and bonuses related to health allowances.In addition, the hotel management will be able to ensure that employees spend their budgets on the items that they need to, and the management allows them to.When employees do not pay the entire amount of their health allowances, the management could keep the remaining balance which indirectly helps the company stay financially healthy.Besides, resources for employees are equally important, and this type of benefit should be communicated regularly to all employees within the organization.Thus, it makes employees appreciate the role benefits perceived even more.Resources for employees as one of the role benefits perceived by them within the organization could be access to gym/yoga club membership, food and beverage vouchers, career advancement, bonuses, learning opportunities, and flexible working hours.Those tangible and intangible resources given to employees result from their role within the firm and communicating the value of this type of role benefits is extremely important.Upon the hotel management, in this case, Human Resources Department successfully settles the right and suitable role benefits packages for its employees.It could result in employees being highly motivated and engaged in the workplace.Having positively engaged employees leads to a low resignation rate, meaning a significantly lower probability of hiring new employees and increasing productivity.
Overall, this study has a limitation in its scope and time constraints.This study only covers five-star hotels in Bali province and the research conducted only for roughly 5 months.For future research, it might be worthwhile to reach a broader scope and longer time constraints, covering the hospitality industry in Indonesia.

Fig. 2 .
Fig. 2. Map of BaliThe population of this study pertains to hotel employees scattered at 62 five-star hotels in Bali, specifically those who had worked during the pandemic as of March 2022.In this study, the sample of 241 respondents is intended to represent the whole population of employees in five-star hotels in Bali province.The authors used Hair et al.'s (2018) formula to measure the minimum sample size for this study.The formula calculates the minimum data samples needed for this study since the population is too large to sample people individually.The formula provides a statistical metric for determining the minimum sample required to ensure that the survey findings are reasonably accurate.It allows researchers to sample the study's population accurately.The confidence level in this study is set at 95%, which means that the error tolerance is set at 5%.Based on this

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT Table 1 .
Operational Variable for Employee Engagement

Table 2 .
Operational Variable for Role Benefit

Table 3 .
Operational Variable for Innovative Behavior

Table 4 .
Validity and Reliability Tests

Table 4 .
(Hair et al., 2014)s meet the minimum threshold of 0.5, it indicates that all variables are accurate and valid(Hair et al., 2014).Therefore, employee engagement, role benefit, and innovative behavior are fundamentally accurate and valid variables to employ in this study.

Table 5 .
Results of the VIF test

Table 6 .
Results of the t test