Abstract

Understanding how organizational members perceive the information relevant to the environmental change is important to the understanding the major issue in the study of organizational behavior. However, not much studies were done about what sort of variables are related to the perception and interpretation of the environmental change. This study of 90 organizational members of a profit organization was to investigate the effect of individual characteristics(locus of control, tolerance of ambiguity career background, etc) and familiarity of the situation on the perception of the environmental change. By the method of simulation using the scenarioes representing environmental change, findings indicated that locus of control and tolerance of ambiguity were significantly correlated with the perception of the environmental change and that the career background was also related to the perception. Additional results indicated that familiarity could be the boundary condition in the threat bias phenomenon which was found in the Dutton & Jackson(1988)'s study.