Cognitive empathy and opinion leadership

H9i Cognitive empathy will be positively related to opinion leadership. 

The companies which have not been excluded were then contacted and asked, if they would take part in the survey. The design of the study required that all employees (or a significant share, e.g. marketing and product management) were induded. Three of the firms contacted agreed to take part in the survey. In one of the cases, all employees of the firms were contacted, in the two other cases only the departments which are in contact with customers and products (marketing, sales, R D, product management) 

Responses Responses Response Functions contacted overall complete rate 

A Kolmogorov-Smimov test was used to check for non-normality of data (Hair et aL 1998). The test was significant (5% level of significance) for 12 of the 27 indicator variables, which indicates a deviation from the normality assumption in these cases. The same test was conducted on the construct level and was insignificant for all latent variables (p 0,10), indiich means tliat the aggregate data can be assumed to be normally distributed. 

Kruskal-Wallis tests were conducted to find out, if the context (firm affiliation, department affiliation) influenced the responses. This test was appropriate due to the non-normality on item level of most of my data. There were no significant firm or department level differences with respect to the data (5% level of significance), except for five cases (firm affiliation had a significant effect on UEl, Cll, and CI2 department affiliation had a significant effect on CEl and CE2). However this effect seems negligible since the other 49 indicators were not Influenced by the context variables. Yet 1 will control for this effect and its influence on the dependent variables in a robustness check alter the main data analysis. 

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