A PCA-BASED STUDY ON THE IMPACT OF PORT INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT ON EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION AT THE NEW MANGALORE PORT

Indian ports along with the Shipping industry play a vital role and act as a corollary to the growth and development of the country's trade. With almost every organization striving towards modernization in terms of infrastructure development, adopting green strategy and thereby increasing the volume of the trade, New Mangalore Port Trust stands second to none in those initiatives. The purpose of this study is to understand if such enhancements in the port infrastructure influence the employee satisfaction at NMPT. When the work environment adapts a highly state-ofthe-art infrastructure, naturally the morale should be shooting up, which will be evident in the productivity. NMPT has seen an upsurge in the business, which could be related directly to the employee satisfaction and thus comes the need for the study. The constructs were deduced from the suggestions of the Focus group formed from the officials of the port, who identified the initial major constructs and their respective items. Five major constructs were selected for the study, with the Exploratory Factor Analysis yielding 23 items under those 5 constructs. Though the constructs were not showing collinearity, the items identified under them did. In order to remove collinearity, the 5 constructs were reduced to three constructs using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Those 5 constructs were Environment Technology (ET), Monitoring & Upgradation (MU), Planning Process, Quality Improvement (PQI), Communication and Cooperation (CC) and Social Security (SS). Further, the terms for the reduced constructs were validated by the same Focus group which decided on the major 5 constructs. The reduced constructs were Social Infrastructure Strategy (SIS), Green Port Strategy (GPS) and Technology Advancement Strategy (TAS). Construct-wise and itemwise validity were conducted for the survey instrument and then the research was taken up with the Class 1 and Class II officers of NMPT. The results established the fact that the enhancements in the port infrastructure have greatly influenced the employee satisfaction, which could be interpreted from the findings of the study