Roles of Travel Destination Image, Travel Motivation, Self-Congruity and Perceived Value toward Travel Incentives on Employee Motivation and Performance

Abstract

Organizational reward is known as one of the best strategies to enhance employees' working performance and productivity. Travel incentive is a type of the organizational reward that aims to promote performance, recognition, engagement, and even loyalty of the employees, customers, and business partners. Travel incentives include individual business meeting, group travel to offsite business meetings, as well as the travel and tours to any places outside the office. Travel incentive programs have been used in several firms around the world. The uses of the travel incentives seem to be gradually increasing. In Thailand, the MICE industry (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions-Congress, and Exhibition) is focused as the national policy. Even though the importance of the travel incentive is recognized, motivation process of the travel incentives on the employee working performance and other employee's factors that are related to travel incentive seemed to be overlooked. Thus, the question "How travel destination image, travel motivation, and self-congruity influence the employees' perceived value on the travel incentives, their working motivation, as well as their working performance?" is proposed as the main research question of this. study. Interviews were done in the exploratory research stage to get the details and understanding on the travel incentive programs utilized in Thai business context. Then, questionnaire survey was performed. The 418 sets of data were collected, 316 sets from the employees who had direct experience on traveling under the travel incentive programs while the rest 102 sets of data were from those who had no such expenence. The structural equation modeling was performed to determine the relationships among major constructs and to test hypotheses. The results indicated that only some dimensions of the destination image influenced perceived value on travel incentive program and working performance. All three dimensions of the destination image had no influence on the working motivation. Travel motivation influenced perceived value, extrinsic work motivation as well as working performance of the employees but it had no effect on the intrinsic work motivation. Self-congruity was found to influence perceived value and extrinsic work motivation but not intrinsic work motivation and working performance. Perceived value on the travel incentive program could influence both intrinsic and extrinsic work motivation but had no direct influence on working performance. Finally, both intrinsic and extrinsic work motivation were found to influence working performance of the employees.