THE ROLE OF FUNCTIONAL TOP MANAGEMENT TEAM IN INITIATING THE STRATEGIC ALLIANCES AS OUTCOME FROM INNOVATIVENESS BEHAVIOR: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM STAR HOTELS

Abstract

One way that is widely used by many organizations in general, including hotelsto survive in a business competition climate is to encourage employees to have an entrepre-neurial mindset and behavior in carrying out their respective functions. The mindset andbehavior must, of course, be initiated and supported by the Top Management Team (TMT)including the Functional Top Management Team (FTMT) level. However, unfortunately,some FTMT members do not have the same mindset and behavior. FTMT is like the heart ofan organization and functions as a predecessor from the birth of a business strategy suchas strategic alliances. In the context of hotels, strategic alliances should ideally be bornfrom innovative ideas that are not only the responsibility of FTMT. Thus, FTMT must alsoplay a role to encourage the creation of innovation that is in line with the organization’svision, mission, goals, and competencies. Improving the entrepreneurial orientation of thehotel, especially the innovativeness factor is an important step to initiate the application ofstatistic alliances which of course the strategy should come from the ideas of the FTMT.This study tries to analyze the role of FTMT and its influence on innovation and theapplication of business strategies in the form of strategic alliances. Data collected from 294 and 5 star hotels in Surabaya were analyzed using structural equation modeling to sup-port the hypothesis of this research. The results of this study indicate that all three hypoth-eses can be accepted where FTMT influences innovativeness and strategic alliance.Innovativeness also has a direct influence on strategic alliances