This study aims to investigate the structural casual relationship on the effect of social support on fashion designer's turnover intention and the mediating effect of burnout, and to make organizations recognize that fashion designer's social support ...
This study aims to investigate the structural casual relationship on the effect of social support on fashion designer's turnover intention and the mediating effect of burnout, and to make organizations recognize that fashion designer's social support is important for burnout and turnover intention, and to suggest implications for efficient human resources management by providing basic data for program development to improve social support of fashion designers.
For an empirical analysis of this study, previous studies on social support, burnout and turnover intention were analyzed, and questionnaires that reflected characteristics of variables, were produced, based on the analysis results. For achieving this study purpose, research problem were set as below.
First, what effect does fashion designer's social support have on turnover intention?
Second, what effect does fashion designer's social support on burnout?
Third, what effect does fashion designer's burnout on turnover intention?
Fourth, is there a mediating effect of fashion designer's burnout on the relationship between social support and turnover intention?
On the basis of these four research problems, the following research was conducted.
In order to settle these research problems, this study set a research model which consists of social support as an independent variable, turnover intention as a dependent variable and burnout as a mediating variable. As a survey method, internet, face-to-face interview and face-to-face interview through middle management of fashion companies were used. Total 250 questionnaires were distributed and 230 out of them were collected.
Then, total 204 questionnaires except unreliable responses were finally analyzed for this study. For analysis, SPSS 18.0 program was employed, and frequency analysis, factor analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis were carried out. From this survey and analysis, empirical results were obtained as follows.
First, when investigating the effect of fashion designer's social support on turnover intention, as components of social support, supervisor's support and colleague's support showed a significant correlation coefficient with turnover intention, and there was a negative correlation. This means that as supervisor's support and colleague's support increased, turnover intention reduced.
Second, when investigating the effect of fashion designer's social support on burnout, there were no statistically significant differences in the effect of supervisor's support on emotional exhaustion as a component of burnout and the effect of colleague's support on the reduction in personal achievement. But supervisor's support showed a significant correlation coefficient with dehumanization and reduction in personal achievement, and colleague's support showed a significant correlation coefficient with emotional exhaustion and dehumanization, and there was a negative correlation. This implies that the increase in social support led to the decrease in burnout.
Third, when investigating the effect of fashion designer's burnout on turnover intention, as components of burnout, emotional exhaustion, dehumanization and reduction in personal achievement showed a significant correlation coefficient with turnover intention, and there was a positive correlation. This demonstrates that as burnout increased, turnover intention rose.
Fourth, when verifying the mediating effect of burnout on the relationship between fashion designer's social support and turnover intention, burnout had a partial mediating effect on the relationship between social support and turnover intention.
Based on these results, this study suggested implications to decrease fashion designer's turnover intention for human resources development.
First, since social support decreases turnover intention, it is important to improve supervisor's support and colleague's support for effective human resources management. In particular, supervisor's support has a more significant influence on burnout and turnover intention than colleague's support, so it is required to approach supervisor's support on an organizational level for human resources management.
Second, there is a need to check if there is a program to enhance social support, and how significant the effect of the program has on social support, if there is.
Third, organizations need to show that they are trying to improve social support, with concern about fashion designers.
For follow-up research, this study advanced suggestions as below.
First, follow-up research would need to verify the structural relationship of various influence factors that weren't presented here, though this study provided a theory model through the verification of the structural relationship explaining that social support affected burnout and burnout affected turnover intention. For example, this study only used two variables of social support; supervisor's support and colleague's support to see how they influenced burnout, but there would be a need to consider various influence variables such as family support, structurally.
Second, this study targeted designers who didn't experience turnover and even the first-year and second-year designers that didn't experience burnout, since there were not a lot of fashion designers. Accordingly, further study would have to target more subjects except these designers to generalize the study results.
Third, this study fully depended on subjective self-administered questionnaires of respondents by collecting data from the survey. For that reason, it is hard to guarantee that the subjective evaluations accurately reflect their actual levels of perceptions. In this respect, further study would need to carry out qualitative analysis together using an in-depth interview or a focus group interview, for getting more practical and reliable findings.
Fourth, this study was conducted cross-sectionally during a certain period, so it is difficult to draw definite conclusions. Thus, further study would have to put effort into generalizing the results through longitudinal analysis.
Lastly, there could be a difficulty in generalizing the results, because data were collected using the convenience sampling method. Moreover, it is hard to say that the measurement scale completely reflected characteristics of fashion designers, though it was modified to be appropriate for this study. Therefore, future study would need to collect data using the systematic sampling method and develop a new measurement scale which considers characteristics of fashion designers.