Mix,match & move: Shaping the future of tourism Asia pacific tourism association seventh annual conference Manila,the Philippines, 2001

This research investigates the psychological turnover theory, which is developed based on the Mobley's model, and compares the hotel employees of two culturally different countries: U.S.A. and South Korea. It takes the controversy of transferability of management theories in different cultures into consideration. This study also compares the influencing factors in the particular behavior between the two groups. For both samples, the path analyses using a series of multiple regression analyses have shown the existence of a particular linkage among the four psychological construct variables studied: job satisfaction, organizational commitment, thinking of quitting, and withdrawal intentions, thus supporting the model. Given the possible problems of collinearity between the predicting variables and thereby instability of the regression coefficients, stepwise regression analyses have been employed to serve the second objective of this study, resulting in significant differences between the two samples. In addition, a dummy variable has been created to examine the role of nationality in predicting the turnover behavior, with the nationality turning out to be an important predictor, however, its influence is indirect through organizational or psychological factors.