Exploring the Relationships among Internal Branding, Work Engagement, and Turnover Intention in Public Sports Organizations after the Pandemic

Internal branding has been regarded as important for internalizing an organization’s values and visions to its employees and managing human resources since before the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite changes in the working environment after the pandemic, internal branding is still ignored within public sports organizations in South Korea. Therefore, this study aims at investigating the relationship between internal branding of public sports organizations, work engagement and turnover intention of employees, and to examine the mediating effect of work engagement. This study collected data from 248 employees working for public sports organizations by using the convenience sampling method. The data was analyzed with SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 26.0. The results showed the following: (1) Organizational management culture had a significant positive effect on work engagement, but there was no significant relationship between internal communication and work engagement. (2) Organizational management culture had a negative effect on turnover intention, while internal communication had a positive effect on turnover intention. (3) Work engagement had a significant negative effect on turnover intention, and has been shown to partially mediate the relationship between organizational management culture and turnover intention. This study suggests that employees can differently perceive the effectiveness of organizational management culture and internal communication within internal branding. Therefore, public sports organizations should create an organizational culture in which employees can properly reflect and practice the values and visions of the organization in their work.