Responses to emotional exhaustion: do worker cooperatives matter?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating role of organizational identification in the relationship between emotional exhaustion and turnover intention. It also examines the moderating roles of worker cooperatives in the relationships of emotional exhaustion with organizational identification and turnover intention.

Surveys of worker cooperatives and capitalist firms in the Seoul metropolitan area were conducted in 2016. The hypotheses of this study were tested through multilevel moderated mediation analyses.

This study revealed that organizational identification partially mediated the relationship between emotional exhaustion and turnover intention. The findings of the study provided evidence that worker cooperatives alleviated the adverse relationships of emotional exhaustion with organizational identification and turnover intention.

Since it was conducted with a cross-sectional data set, this study is not free from the issue of causality. However, the findings provide insights into how emotional exhaustion may be associated with organizational identification and turnover intention, and how worker cooperatives may alter these relationships.

Capitalist firms should provide their employees with more autonomy and more opportunities to participate in organizational decision-making, as in worker cooperatives, to induce their employees to hold more positive attitudes.

There is no extant research on the mechanism through which emotional exhaustion is associated with turnover intention via organizational identification, and on the moderating roles of worker cooperatives in this mechanism.