IT engineers in corporations tend to give up on continued employment at a rate exceeding fifty percent due to poor employment conditions and emotional exhaustion. The turnover of high-performing personnel can affect not only corporate business performance but also the motivation of other organizational members. Today, IT constitutes a core element among strategic competitive advantage factors for enhancing and maintaining corporate competitiveness. In IT departments, human resource management and internal marketing are critical factors for the overall success of strategic management. As the role of IT departments in organizations becomes more emphasized, IT employees face greater pressure regarding work performance. This is why most IT employees experience emotional exhaustion or find it difficult to achieve job satisfaction. There are many factors that influence turnover or turnover decision-making in organizations. Turnover intention is one of the good predictors of actual turnover. This study regards emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction as factors influencing turnover intention and seeks to identify the structural relationships among them.

In this study, a structural equation model was developed to empirically analyze the factors affecting turnover intention of employees in IT departments. Organizational justice was considered as an important independent variable in model construction, and social support—comprising supervisor support and coworker support—was considered as a moderating variable. While many existing studies have argued that the mediating variables of job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion influence turnover intention, this study classified organizational justice into distributive justice, interactional justice, and procedural justice, and revealed that organizational justice affects two mediating variables consisting of job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion, while social support plays a moderating role between the mediating variables and turnover intention. The results of validity analysis and hypothesis testing for the structural model confirmed that model fit was secured, and that distributive justice and interactional justice have a negative (-) effect on emotional exhaustion and a positive (+) effect on job satisfaction. Furthermore, the results of moderation effect analysis revealed that social support in the form of supervisor and coworker support moderates the relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intention, and that coworker support also moderates the relationship between emotional exhaustion and turnover intention. Through empirical analysis, it was confirmed that the more IT employees receive help from colleagues in their department, the more job satisfaction increases and turnover intention decreases, and that coworker support mitigates emotional exhaustion. The results of this study can provide useful information for deriving measures to reduce the frequent turnover intentions of corporate IT employees, and also suggest the need to develop strategic programs that enable colleagues and supervisors to cooperate with and support IT employees.