A Study on the Relationship among Organizational Cynicism, Shared Leadership, Organization Trust, and Affirmative Commitment

Purpose - This study was conducted to empirically identify the relationship between organizational cynicism, shared leadership, organizational trust, and affirmative commitment targeting church organizations facing crises due to COVID-19. In addition, it was conducted to expand research in related fields by analyzing church organizations, which are non-profit organizations, from a management perspective. Design/Methodology/Approach - For this research, 20 churches and five church-related institutions were used to conduct a survey, and 202 copies of the collected questionnaires were used for statistical analysis. In order to achieve the purpose of the study, frequency analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, reliability analysis, and correlation analysis were conducted, and the hypothesis was verified through structural equation model analysis. Findings - As a result of the study, organizational cynicism and shared leadership each had a significant effect on emotional commitment through organizational trust. However, there was no direct effect, and organizational trust played a complete mediating role. Research Implications - This study generally supports the results of previous studies that studied the influence relationship of organizational cynicism, shared leadership, organizational trust, and affirmative commitment variables, and slightly different results due to the characteristics of church organizations were also derived. Accordingly, this study tried to find ways to activate shared leadership and alleviate organizational cynicism. This study is meaningful in that it empirically analyzed the negative and positive factors affecting the organization at the same time by adapting the results of research conducted on companies to church organizations, which are non-profit.