The Effect of Tax Officials’ Organizational Communication on Job Performance: Focused on the Moderating Effect of Trust

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether organizational communication factors - top-down, bottom-up, and horizontal communication - affect job performance when tax officials perform their duties, and to empirically analyze their relationship using the moderating variables of trust to see if organizational communication on job performance differs according to trust. The results of the analysis show that factors of organizational communication that have a positive effect on job performance are top-down communication and horizontal communication. Among them, horizontal communication has a greater effect. In addition, the analysis result of interaction effect by moderating regression analysis shows that only horizontal communication x trust has a significant positive effect on job performance except top-down communication and bottom-up communication among organizational communication factors. This means that the more smooth the horizontal communication in the tax organization is, the higher the trust gets. It suggests that, given that related duties in tax affairs are handled jointly and the organizational transactions are done together though the progress of tax affairs is mostly handled individually, horizontal communication has a positive effect on forming a network between colleagues and departments in the organization and on solving problems and conflicts in the work, thereby enhancing the job performance. The suggestions for future research are as follows. First, this study is the result of analyzing tax officials working in Busan, Ulsan and Gyeongnam-do (province), so the number of samples is limited. It is necessary to expand the region and organization because there is a limit to generalizing the results of the study. Second, it is considered that the same method has a problem in that the data were collected using the questionnaire limited to a few items by the self-report questionnaire, so further research that can increase external validity using various data should be conducted.