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This paper aims to analyze the effects of inter-organizational relationships with core and peripheral partners on innovation in heritage tourism clusters.

The empirical analysis uses original data (collected by means of a postal questionnaire) based at UNESCO World Heritage Cities in Spain. The sample consists of 215 companies, and the methodology used is hierarchical linear regression.

The authors identify divergent effects of relationships with core and peripheral partners on innovation. In particular, the effect of core partners has an inverted U-shaped form, while that of peripheral partners is U-shaped.

The results may be extrapolated to other heritage tourism clusters located in World Heritage Cities with some precaution. The paper does not jointly analyze the effects of relationships with core and peripheral partners on the innovation of firms in tourism clusters.

Clustered tourism firms should not rely only on relationships with core agents, because beyond a critical threshold, returns in terms of innovation diminish. Firms should strive to establish relationships with peripheral agents in spite of the initial difficulties and the costs associated with network building, because positive returns soon materialize.

This paper contributes to the literature on inter-organizational relationships by analyzing the impact of relationships with core and peripheral partners on innovation in clustered firms. The authors highlight the existence of the divergent curvilinear effects of these relationships on heritage tourism clusters.

This paper aims to process underlying the relationship between supervisor servant leadership and employee organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in hotels. Specifically, it analyzes the mediating role of empathy – individual level – and service climate – group level – in the relationship between supervisor servant leadership and employee OCB.

The empirical analysis uses original data on hotels located in historic cities in Spain. A survey provided a sample of 343 work-group-level (supervisors) and 835 individual-level (employee) from a sample of 171 hotels.

The most interesting finding is the indirect effect of supervisor servant leadership on employee OCB through the mediating role of both employee empathy – individual level – and group service climate – group level.

The findings suggest that hotel supervisors should adopt servant leadership to enhance OCB in their workgroups. This paper also provides insights into other ways to increase employee OCB, namely, through human resources initiatives that enhance employee empathy and shape a service climate within groups.

This paper is one of the few that analyzes the relationships between supervisor servant leadership, employee empathy, group service climate and employee OCB in a unifying cross-level model. It is also the first to analyze employee empathy as a positive outcome of supervisor servant leadership, as well as a mechanism to explain the relationship between servant leadership and employee OCB. Finally, it is one of the few studies that analyzes all these relationships in conjunction within the hospitality industry.

This paper aims to analyze the extent to which social capital (SC) spurs innovation in firms located within tourism clusters. Specifically, the study focuses on the mediating role of ambidextrous knowledge strategy (AKS) on the relationship between SC and innovation.

A structural model is used on a sample of 215 firms of the hospitality and tourism industry located in World Heritage Cities of Spain. Data analysis is carried out using partial least squares.

The combination of bonding and bridging capital yields higher innovation performance through AKS.

This analysis does not take into account the full set of confounding factors that influence innovation. The factors captured by this study significantly explain heterogeneity in the intensity of innovation among the studied firms.

The main recommendation is that firms located in cultural tourism clusters (CTCs) do not restrict the focus on either local or outside relations only but pursue a strategy based on the combination of internal and external relations. This will enable ambidextrous knowledge strategies and better innovation performance.

There are numerous studies on the relation between some dimensions of SC, some knowledge strategies and some types of innovation. The value added of the present study is the articulation of complementarities among these dimensions. In particular, this study integrates bonding and bridging dimensions of SC, exploration and exploitation of knowledge and incremental and radical innovation. In addition, the paper provides an empirical identification of World Heritage Cities of Spain as CTCs.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of innovation in services. First, service firms were classified according to the degree of customization of service product and technology, because it reflects the degree of interaction between producer and consumer. This is a key element in the process of production and, hence, in the innovation developed by these firms. Second, we identified four different modes of innovation in Spanish service firms, which reflect diverse patterns of innovation according to depth of changes introduced by firms. Finally, we examined how the innovation patterns are generalized by the type of service firms, confirming that there is a relationship between production and innovation strategies. This paper yields empirical evidence from Spanish services, showing that service firms develop innovations coherently according to their production strategy.