Perceived organizational change in the hotel industry: An implication of change schema

A schema, first proposed by Fiske and Taylor (1984), is a cognitive structure that represents organized knowledge on a given concept or type of stimulus. Lau and Woodman (1995) further explained that when an organization experiences changes, its members have various interpretations of and expectations for those changes. The cognitive understanding of change is guided by a mental map that represents the knowledge structures of the attributes of change and relationships between different events of change. This mental map refers to the so-called change schema (Lau and Woodman, 1995). The objectives of this study are to apply this change schema to organizational change in hotels, and to examine the antecedents and consequences of organizational change.Employees have been identified as a potential source of resistance to change (Okumus and Hemmington, 1998), therefore with this study we assess the perceptions of organizational change of front-line employees in hotels. The sample group was drawn from 246 hotel employees in Taiwan. Results confirm that the five dimensions of the organizational change schema (Salience, Impact, Significance, Meaning, and Control) are applicable in a hotel setting. Furthermore, only communication (not participation and training) has a strong influence on organizational change. In turn, the nature of the organizational changes themselves contributes significantly to employees’ attitudes toward both organizational change and organizational commitment. This study also indicates that employees recognize and are concerned about changes within their hotels, suggesting that hotel managers need to be aware of the influences of such changes on hotels and go about the implementation changes very carefully.