Organizational Change for Port Authorities: A Social Information Processing Analysis

Abstract

Port authorities, like other organizations, have been constantly required to evolve in response to business, environmental, and technical changes since the 1980s to continue improving their competitiveness and performance. However, people often resist change due to various reasons, and the uncertainty of change has been pointed out as one of the most important reasons why this happens. This study contributes to social information processing (SIP) research and constructs an SIP model to explore employee’s response to port organizational reform in Taiwan. Empirical results are consistent with general job schema, where employees with job security orientation are less supportive of port corporatization, and those with corporate development orientation are more supportive of port organizational reform. Organizational trust and job conception are related to port workers’ attitude to port corporatization. Nevertheless, organizational communication does not positively moderate the relationship between job schema and employee attitude to port organizational change.