Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how corporate social responsibility activities affect the turnover level and technological innovation performance. Additionally, this study explores whether the turnover level has a mediating effect between corporate social responsibility activities and technological innovation performance.
Research design, data, and methodology: In order to verify the hypothesis, this study uses the 2nd to 5th (2007 to 2013) data sets of the Workplace Panel Survey (WPS) as conducted by the Korea Labor Institute. And based on the methods of Baron and Kenny (1986), fixed effect regression analysis was conducted using unbalanced panel data composed of 1561 (5827 observations) companies. Finally, a bootstrap test was carried out to further verify the mediating effect of turnover level.
Results: As a result of the fixed effect regression analysis and bootstrap test, the corporate social responsibility activities were found to have a negative (-) effect on turnover level. the relationship between corporate social responsibility activities and technological innovation performance was found to be positive (+). while, the relationship between turnover level and technological innovation performance was found to be negative (-). And finally, turnover level was confirmed to have a partial mediation effect between corporate social responsibility activities and technological innovation performance.
Implications: This study confirms that the active implementation of corporate social responsibility activities has a positive effect on preventing the outflow of manpower and technological innovation. In addition, the turnover level will affect the innovation of enterprises. Therefore, enterprises should not regard corporate social responsibility activities as a burden. Furthermore, they should actively establish systems for corporate social responsibility activities in addition to preventing the outflow of human resources to promote corporate technological innovation.