The Impact of Multinational Corporation Employees’ Cultural Empathy on Multicultural Acceptance through Social Capital

This study aims to examine the effects of cultural empathy among multinational corporation (MNCs) employees on social capital with local stakeholders and to empirically investigate the mechanism through which the developed social capital contributes to enhancing employees’ multicultural acceptance. To achieve this research objective, a survey was conducted with 167 MNCs located in Korea as the sample. The empirical analysis results demonstrate that among the subdimensions of cultural empathy of MNCs employees, empathic emotion and expression, empathic perspective-taking, and empathic awareness exert significant positive effects on social capital formation with local stakeholders, whereas acceptance of cultural differences does not exhibit statistically significant effects. Furthermore, it was confirmed that social capital possessed by MNCs exerts a significant positive effect on enhancing employees’ multicultural acceptance.