Research on the Effect of the Different Empathy Ability of Supervisor on the Turnover Intention in the Organizational Culture

Abstract

Background/Objectives: This research is made to find out what kind of moderating effect the empathy ability of supervisor makes on the turnover intention in the hierarchical organizational culture.

Methods/Statistical analysis: The subjects for this research are the employees working for small and mid-sized companies in Korea and the questionnaires were distributed to them for the research. The questionnaire was made up of 16 questions including 4 demographical questions and the measuring was made by using 5-point Likert scale. For the empirical analysis, SPSS 23.0 program was used and the feasibility analysis, reliability analysis, regression analysis and the test of moderating effect were performed.

Findings: As the number of independent variable was just one, the factory analysis was not conducted. The results of reliability analysis showed that Cronbach Alpha values were all 0.6 or more. In addition, the correlation analysis results showed that the correlation between the hierarchical organizational culture and turnover intention was 0.931 and the correlation between the hierarchical organizational culture and the empathy ability of supervisor was 0.242, thus showing the low correlation. On the other hand, the correlation between the turnover intention and the empathy ability of supervisor was 0.661, thus showing a little high correlation. All of them showed the significance probabilities of 0.0000. The regression analysis showed that the hierarchical organizational culture made a significant effect on the turnover intention. As the analysis of moderating effect shows the increase in the value R² with the significance probability of less than 0.05, it was confirmed that the empathy ability of supervisor has the moderating effect. This means that even though the hierarchical organizational culture may affect the turnover intention, the empathy ability of supervisor may lower the turnover intention.

Improvements/Applications: The future researches are required to focus on the methodology of enhancing the empathy ability and the tools for measuring the empathy ability along with the development of program.