Situational Perception and Communicative Behaviour of Civil Servants in Relation to the Implementation of Sales and Services Tax (SST) 2.0

Abstract

The Pakatan Harapan Government has implemented the Sales and Services Tax (SST) 2.0 beginning from 1 st September 2018 to alleviate the burden faced by the people due to increasing cost of living. In this regard, 1.6 million civil servants have the potential to be mobilised as government communication agents to help disseminate information about SST 2.0 to the people. However, not much is known about the situational perception and communicative behaviour of civil servants towards SST 2.0. This study aims to understand the situational perception and communicative behaviour of civil servants concerning the implementation of SST 2.0 based on Situational Theory of Publics. Data were collected from 616 respondents consisting of 209 respondents from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA) and 407 respondents from the Royal Malaysian Customs Department (RMCD). The findings indicated high awareness among MOHA and RMCD staff with regard to SST 2.0. However, MOHA demonstrated passive communicative behaviour while RMCD demonstrated active communicative behaviour. The regression analysis results found that for the MOHA sample, Referent Criterion was the main predictor contributing 30.2% and 28.7% to information processing and information seeking behaviour respectively. While for the RMCD sample, Constraint Recognition was the main predictor contributing 43.5% and 41.6% to information processing and information seeking behaviour respectively. Looking from the theoretical aspect, Referent Criterion contributed significantly to the communicative behaviour of civil servants and should be considered as one of the predictors of communicative behaviour in future studies involving improvements or reforms on existing government policies. Keywords: situational theory of publics; situational perception; communicative behaviour