At the start of this year, one SK Hynix employee received a performance bonus worth 2,964% of their base salary — an average of roughly 150 million won per person. Look at that number alone and you'd assume no one would ever leave. The actual voluntary turnover rate: 0.9%. Up to this point, the simplest explanation fits perfectly: pay people that well and they stay.
The trouble is that at other large corporations paying comparable salaries, something entirely different is unfolding. Over the same period, employees' freedom-of-expression scores and their sense of psychological safety have been falling noticeably — a trend visible in data from Blind, the anonymous workplace app. The money is similar; the experience of actually working there is not.
That gap now has a name. On May 12, at Wanted Lab's "Hive Five 2026" conference held at COEX in Seoul, Shin Jae-yong, a professor at Seoul National University's business school, introduced the concept of "emotional salary." It has quickly become one of the fastest-spreading terms in Korean HR circles.
Hired on the Numbers, Gone on the Feelings
Emotional salary refers to the monetary value of the workplace experiences that never show up as figures — the work environment, relationships, the quality of feedback, opportunities to grow, autonomy. Shin treats it as something measurable within an accounting framework: invisible value, he argues, can be quantified. It sounds abstract, but the examples he offered on stage were anything but.
The SK Hynix bonus story begins in 2021, when one employee sent an internal email challenging the company's compensation system. Nicknamed "Martyr Kim," that single email eventually led to an agreement to pay out 10% of operating profit — and bore fruit this year in that 2,964% figure.
Shin didn't read the episode as proof that "a generous bonus works." The very fact that one employee's voice could reshape the entire organization's compensation structure was itself a signal that, in that company, people can speak their minds. His reading: the bonus didn't create psychological safety; psychological safety came first, and that was what made the email possible to begin with.
The one sentence he says landed most deeply with the HR managers packing the hall was this:
"Just as we marry over the terms but divorce over differences in temperament, we take a job for the monetary salary but quit over a lack of emotional salary."
A monetary salary gets people through the door; what determines whether they stay is something else entirely.
Top Performance, Bottom Morale
The higher-performing an organization, the more easily an internal compulsion takes hold: we cannot fail. That compulsion makes people read the room before voicing an opinion. It pushes them to seek approval before trying anything new, and even when they spot a problem, to calculate "what happens to me if I say this" before reporting it. An organization that looks like it's running smoothly on the outside while quietly stiffening within — it's a common pattern.
That was exactly Shin's point. An organization where top performance coexists with a "we can't fail" compulsion and a rigid culture will never fully hold on to its talent, no matter how high the monetary salary. SK Hynix's 2,964% was a result, not a cause.
On the surface, this looks like an era of the Great Stay. As the job market has frozen over, more people are gritting their teeth in positions they're unhappy with. Shin described this state as workers "clinging to their companies like wet leaves you can't sweep away" — the calm before the storm, in his diagnosis. And demographics won't let that calm last.
Starting in 2026, Korea's youth population is projected to plummet, falling more than 15% from its peak by 2035. In some graduate programs, the dynamic has already flipped: where professors once chose their students, students now do the choosing. The day Korea inherits the hiring crunch Japan faces today, top science-and-engineering R&D talent will weigh multiple offers and go "shopping." When that day comes, organizations with low emotional salary can raise the monetary kind all they want — it will be too late.
There's something HR researchers have stressed for a long time: when you diagnose an organization's sustainability, the density of the informal psychological contract matters as much as the formal compensation system. The more an employee accumulates the experience of feeling "my voice registers in this organization," the higher their threshold for even considering leaving rises. That threshold is the real value of emotional salary — an asset built over years, not minted by a single year-end bonus.
The Reasons People Stay Are Being Built Right Now
All of this might sound like it applies only to large corporations. But the logic of emotional salary operates regardless of organization size. A solo entrepreneur working with a single collaborator, a director running a small team, a planner who repeatedly hires freelancers — all of them can audit their own organization within this frame.
The most direct place to check is the direction of feedback. Watch whether the person you work with grows defensive when receiving your feedback, or simply moves on to the next attempt. If they get defensive, it's worth first examining how that feedback is being delivered. Whether you ask about the cause first or scrutinize the outcome first when a mistake happens belongs to the same context.
The direction of reporting is a signal too. Is it a structure where the other person brings problems to you first, or one where things only surface because you discovered them yourself? If it's the latter, there's a good chance they're already calculating "what happens if I say this." Repeat that calculation enough times and emotional salary is quietly chipped away.
The retrospective after a project ends is crucial as well. A structure that reviews only when things went well, versus one that examines the causes together even when results fell short, builds entirely different reserves of trust over the long run. Whether someone keeps offering proposals after one of their ideas wasn't adopted, whether you say "feel free to handle it your way" while in practice inserting yourself into every decision — same context. Autonomy is confirmed in behavior, not in declarations.
Emotional salary doesn't accumulate through one-off events. It isn't built by praising someone once a quarter or offering thanks at year's end. Its substance is the accumulation of everyday interactions — every time you give feedback, every time you set a direction — that leave the other person feeling "working with this person is worth it." That accumulation becomes, nine years from now when the hiring market has flipped, an asset no monetary salary can buy.
Over the nine years remaining until 2035, the task is to make the people you work with now feel, again and again, that "in this organization, even my failure becomes material for the next attempt." That is the source of a gap that — once the demographic cliff is real — money won't be able to close quickly.
A monetary salary brings people in; an emotional salary makes them stay. And the people who stay are the ones who ultimately build the organization's future.
