Measuring practitioners’ creativity in the Taiwanese tourism and hospitality industry

•Developing a new creativity scale that highlights the importance of creativity in the tourism and hospitality sector.•The scale’s reliability and validity are examined through EFA then CFA.•Using samples collected from 854 tourism and hospitality practitioners.•The results identify five critical attributes of creativity: process, creativity, culture, proactive personality, and satisfaction.

This study draws on tourism and hospitality literature to develop a new creativity scale that highlights the importance of creativity in the tourism and hospitality industry. It is important for practitioners to develop greater creativity so as to solve problems and obtain competitive advantages. However, few studies have comprehensively examined the impact of creativity on changes in the tourism and hospitality industry, and there is a lack of empirical research on the critical attributes of creativity from the perspective of tourism and hospitality practitioners. This study seeks to fill this gap by constructing and testing a new theoretical model in the tourism and hospitality sector. The scale’s reliability and validity are examined through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), using samples collected from 854 tourism and hospitality practitioners (579 college students majoring in tourism and hospitality and 275 practitioners in the tourism and hospitality industry). The results identify five critical attributes of creativity: process, creativity, culture, proactive personality, and satisfaction. The implications for theoretical and practical applications are also discussed.